AustLit

'In Australian and British universities, creative discourse is often devalued as a research activity in favour of hard scientific paradigms, and even though the artefact is the primary research activity for the Ph.D. in Creative Writing, it is relegated to a secondary way of knowing, which needs to be translated into more ‘respectable' academic discourse in order to be recognised as legitimate or ‘real’ research. This paper re–affirms the creative artefact as primary research activity, an end in itself, not a means to another, and asserts itself in the academic arena as its own discourse which is not accountable to any other discourse for its legitimacy. It needs no exegetical justification, sets its own parameters, and needs to be evaluated as a literary work using literary tools to measure its research value. This paper also examines the distinction made between Creative Writing and Creative Writing Studies in defining how an artefact creates knowledge and offers a series of philosophical experiments to examine if and how a creative artefact can be considered research, and suggests that the exegesis, rather than being the main conduit of research, is a shorthand device to demonstrate the competencies of the artefact as research.'(Publication abstract)

'J.M. Coetzee’s focus on animals in Disgrace and The Lives of Animals forces his readers to question the contours of their ethical frameworks, including the distinction between human and animal realms and whether animals must necessarily compete for imaginative space with human beings. I argue that Coetzee asks us to envision what effect human and animal interactions can have in the midst of trauma, and offers the idea of grace as a surprising, if tentative, answer.' (Publication abstract)

'Using J.M. Coetzee's The Lives of Animals (Coetzee 1999) as a basis, our article compares the straightforward ethical reading of literature as an unproblematic means for creating reader sympathy (as exemplified by the work of Martha Nussbaum), with an approach based on Emmanuel Levinas's sense of otherness. For Levinas, reading involves an awareness of otherness that does not control or circumscribe the other, but that encourages a continual unfolding of its possibilities. In this connection, he distinguishes between the “said”, that which is complete, written down once and for all, and the “saying”, that which can “interrupt” our readerly assumptions by revealing the presence of otherness. The sense of otherness, because so fundamental to our interaction with the world, needs to be respected, our ethical obligation or responsibility towards it acknowledged. We believe The Lives of Animals fosters such a sense of obligation. It both thematises moral concerns and helps enact moral understanding, unlike a straightforward sympathetic approach, which depends on exclusionary opposition at the expense of a more knowing engagement with otherness.'  (Introduction)

'Sympathy, understood to be the capacity to suffer with the other, has long been regarded as one of the major vehicles to inspire an ethical communion. By minimizing differences through identification, sympathy helps us resonate with other beings and to exist in relation to them. This thesis examines the ethical endeavors on the vexed question of sympathy in four works by J. M. Coetzee - - The Lives of Animals (1999), Disgrace (1999), Elizabeth Costello (2003) and Slow Man (2005), all of which manifest Coetzee's notable interest in a fully-engaged sympathetic imagination into depraved and deprived human or nonhuman subjects. ' (Thesis summary)