Sobriquet 37.5
One of the best parts of library research is the photocopying. Seriously. Since it takes so long to locate, copy, collate, and staple journal articles, one has the delightful sense of having worked without exerting any significant amount of effort in the process.
On the other hand, I find myself frustrated by the fact that the library I use does not subscribe to every single serial ever published. Thus, of the forty articles listed in the MLA database pertaining to Age of Iron
, only a dozen or so were to be found in the library, forcing me to resort to the library's cleverly-dubbed "Iliad" inter-library loan service to request help from afar (because, you know, requesting books and articles from distant libraries is an awful lot like the Trojan War).So, after I collected the articles, I decided to read Georg M. Gugelberger's "'Heralding' the New 'Age of Iron': J. M. Coetzee's Homelessness, Migrancy, and Nomadology," an essay both interesting and frustrating. I say "frustrating" because the article is riddled with the sort of errors one hates to find in a peer-reviewed academic journal. First of all, Gugelberger erroneously refers to Coetzee's novel as "The Age of Iron" throughout the paper, adding the definite article to the title for no apparent reason. In a similar vein, Mrs. Curren, the novel's protagonist, becomes "Mrs. Cullen" by the essay's end (134). Furthermore, the author calls Curren "an old spinster," a designation that might mislead readers unfamiliar with Coetzee's novel into believing that the woman has never been married (although it is not explicitly stated that Curren was, in fact, married, the novel is in the form of an epistolary novel to her daughter in which she makes several comments suggesting she had lost a husband to illness some time prior to the opening of the book). Strangely, while Gugelberger does use the elderly woman's correct surname at this stage in his essay, he dubs her "Ellen," when her name is actually Elizabeth (130). I realize I am playing semantic games here, but little errors like these make me doubt the author's grasp of the novel and, as a result, cast a shadow of doubt over the interpretations and claims in the article.
Additionally, for an essay appearing in a journal called "Christianity and Literature," there is no mention of Christianity and--oddly--hardly any discussion of Coetzee's literature. Instead, Gugelberger speaks in broad terms of a paradigm shift he imagines will take place in the humanities. Drawing on Edward Said's discussions of exile, the author posits that a concern with metaphysical homelessness will take the place of the Other as the locus of postcolonial discourse, and suggests that Coetzee, constantly at the vanguard of the literary imagination, serves as the harbinger for this new movement. Despite his careless errors, however, Gugelberger is right to identify a somewhat broader conception of homelessness as a major--not necessarily the major--concern of writers caught under the umbrella of postcolonialism. One need look no further than Slow Man for evidence of this concern: Elizabeth Costello is "homeless" when separated from Paul Rayment, who has spent his life living in homes, but never feeling "at home" (159). Still, the article adds little to the body of criticism surrounding Coetzee and, despite its overtures towards redefining a literary-cultural epoch, merely repeats, to greater or lesser degrees, the same conceptions of homelessness one encounters in Said's discussions of exile, Steinbeck's depiction of Okies, Rushdie's notion of an "imaginary homeland," or Camus's vision of l'etranger.
For tomorrow: Read a minimum of two more essays and see if any of the articles I could not find in my library are available at Cornell's library.
How nerdy am I? This nerdy:
Works Cited
Coetzee, J. M. Slow Man. New York: Viking, 2005.
Gugelberger, Georg M. "'Heralding' the New 'Age of Iron': J. M. Coetzee, Homelessness, Migrancy, and Nomadology." Christianity and Literature. 45.1 (1995): 129-36.
Gugelberger, Georg M. "'Heralding' the New 'Age of Iron': J. M. Coetzee, Homelessness, Migrancy, and Nomadology." Christianity and Literature. 45.1 (1995): 129-36.
Comments
I can post!!!!! You fixed it!!!
Anyway, I just wanted to say hello and that I'm here to give you moral support. You can always call me to complain, I'll listen (as usual). I'm very proud that you are my brother and I always tell everyone about you. I can't wait to see you graduate. I know you can do it!
P.S. - I'll try to round up as many other people for support as possible :)
On a completely different note, I started writing on my own blog again. My first post since May was added last night. Sure, it's not important shit I write about and it's not going to get me any further ahead in my life, but at least the space isn't going to waste anymore. And it's all your fault, you damned inspirational-type person.