AustLit

'In this article, I argue that the epiphanies in J.M. Coetzee’s fiction can be read as literary enactments of the ‘creature-feeling’, a feeling of absolute dependence on one’s creatureliness that was first described by the theologian Rudolf Otto. I begin with a discussion of the creature-feeling with reference to William James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) and Rudolf Otto’s The Idea of the Holy (1917). Critics have observed that Coetzee’s fictions suggest shared embodiment as the basis for humans’ ethical responsibility towards other humans and towards animals, and have focussed on Emmanuel Lévinas when addressing theological influences on Coetzee’s non-rational ethics. Bringing James and Otto into the discussion allows me to account for those epiphanic moments in Coetzee that do not overlap with the ethical or the aesthetic, moments in which characters experience what I call secular grace. Coetzee is not the first to enact the creature-feeling: he reworks earlier enactments by James Joyce.' (Publication abstract)