This study argues that the most consistent concern in Coetzee’s oeuvre is the question of what makes us human. Ideas of the human that stress language-use, reason, self-consciousness, autonomy and God-likeness are revised in his novels via a ‘poetic of testing’ which pits intertextually-referenced ideas against each other in polyphonic narratives. The study goes on to purport that without acknowledging Coetzee’s revisions of the human, other concerns in his novels such as ethics, the status of the animal, or racial politics cannot be fully understood. In addition to examining the philosophical provenance of questions of the human in the work of such thinkers as Plato, Hegel, Heidegger, Barthes and Foucault, the study charts Coetzee’s reconfiguration of elements drawn from major literary precursors like Kafka, Beckett and Dostoevsky. Its leading argument is that Coetzee revises the Enlightenment idea of the human as a disengaged, autonomous thinker by demonstrating the limitations of reason; that he instead offers a view of humanity as engaged agency, a view most compatible with ideas developed in the discourse of posthumanism, theories of materiality and social practice theory; and that his revisions depend on narrative form as much as they recommend a narrative approach to ideas in general.weiterlesen