Sobriquet 47.22

I'll have to keep tonight's entry brief. It's late; it's been an exceedingly long day and I am tired. I struggled to fall asleep last night so, despite having the opportunity to listen to the first fifth of Herman Hesse's Demian, the latest on my "Audiobooks to Play in the Dark When I Can't Sleep" list (having finished listening to Paul Auster's excellent Man in the Dark last week), I awoke this morning with a bit more grumpiness than usual. That said, it was not a bad day by any stretch of the imagination, the grumpiness dissipating rather quickly. But it was a busy, fatiguing day nonetheless.

As far as dissertation work goes, I reviewed Richard Brock's "Putting the Soul in Order," another of the essays in the Stirrings Still issue devoted entirely to Coetzee. Brock's text only briefly touches upon Disgrace in what amounts to an oeuvre-encompassing study of the "purgatorial" spaces in Coetzee's fiction. Brock's reading of Disgrace is consistent with a significant strain of Coetzee criticism, namely that which views bodily suffering as the means of achieving a metaphysical understanding of the human (and, perhaps, non-human animal) condition. Furthermore, Brock writes extremely readable prose, making a complex topic both accessible and comprehendible.

For tomorrow: Same as the past couple of days.

Work Cited

Brock, Richard. "Putting the Soul in Order: Purgatorial Spaces and the Role of the Writer in the Novels of J.M. Coetzee" Stirrings Still: The International Journal of Existential Literature 3.1 (2006): 110-127.