Event date: Tuesday 16 June 2009, 5.30 p.m. – 6.30 p.m.
Location: Faculty of Arts and Philosophy, Blandijnberg 2, Faculty Room 

“Mourning and Mimesis: J. M. Coetzee’s Resembling Bodies” given by Dr. Sam Durrant (Leeds University)

“The novels of J. M. Coetzee have consistently dealt with the problem of how to relate to the suffering of others.  Rather than seeking to directly re-present that suffering, Coetzee’s novels attempt to approximate it, by bringing the bodies of his privileged protaganists into proximity with oppressed bodies through a process of resemblance.  This distinction between re-presentation and approximation is precisely what is at stake in Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno’s revision of the notion of mimesis.  While neo-Platonic theories of mimesis as re-presentation rest upon a hierarchical split between art and the world, between the representing subject and the represented object, Benjamin and Adorno understand mimesis as the process by which this division is broken down, as a dynamic, affective process of becoming-similar. Characters such as the Magistrate in Waiting for the Barbarians, Elizabeth Curren in Age of Iron, and David Lurie in Disgrace all undergo a gradual process of self-relinquishment which enables a fleeting identification with those who have been denied the privileges of citizenship. This melancholic identification suggests the grounds for a new form of community, based not on a discourse of sovereignty and rights but on a mutual (but non-identical) experience of loss and a recognition of what Judith Butler has recently termed our ‘common corporeal vulnerability.'”

Sam Durrant is a Senior Lecturer in Postcolonial Literature at Leeds University. His research explores the relationship between literature, critical theory, and postcolonialism, particularly with regard to issues of memory and community. His first monograph,Postcolonial Narrative and the Work of Mourning, was published by State University of New York Press in 2004 (republished in paperback in 2006), and he is working on a second monograph entitled Postapartheid Literature: Mourning and the Invention of Community, to be published by Routledge in 2010.  He has published in a wide range of journals on writers from Africa, the Caribbean, and the U.S., and co-edited the volume Essays in Migratory Aesthetics (Rodopi, 2007).