Reviews
““Slowness is Beauty”: Pound’s Cantos echo Binyon’s dictum and turn it into a modernist motto. Jan Wilm’s alert and thoughtful book energizes the motto by joining fictional syntax and philosophical meditation in patient analyses of the manuscripts. The craft of slowness is shown to underpin the work of Coetzee as he rethinks high modernism. The point is to frustrate a naïve wish to rush to conclusions or reach simple ideas about life, ethics and aesthetics. By learning to read more slowly, we read up on a dauntingly complex world, letting its beauty shine while discriminating between equivocal values.”
— Jean-Michel Rabaté, University of Pennsylvania, USA
“Since the publication of Elizabeth Costello (2003), a lively conversation has developed around Coetzee in philosophy, and philosophy in Coetzee. Jan Wilm brings a new dimension to this debate in The Slow Philosophy of J.M. Coetzee, showing in a series of refreshing readings how the philosophical and the literary come together in a single experience of slow reading. Both erudite and accessible, and drawing fresh insights from Coetzee’s archive, Wilm provides an original account of the Nobel laureate’s distinctively meditative fiction.”
— David Attwell, University of York, UK
You can find out more about this title at the Bloomsbury website.
