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y separately published work icon Youth : Scenes from Provincial Life single work   novel  
Issue Details: First known date: 2002... 2002 Youth : Scenes from Provincial Life
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

"The narrator of Youth, a student in the South Africa of the 1950s, has long been plotting an escape from his native country: from the stifling love of his mother, from a father whose failures haunt him, and from what he is sure is impending revolution. Studying mathematics, reading poetry, saving money, he tries to ensure that when he arrives in the real world, wherever that may be, he will be prepared to experience life to its full intensity, and transform it into art." "Arriving at last in London, however, he finds neither poetry nor romance. Instead he succumbs to the monotony of life as a computer programmer, from which random, loveless affairs offer no relief. Devoid of inspiration, he stops writing. An awkward colonial, a constitutional outsider, he begins a dark pilgrimage in which he is continually tested and continually found wanting" (Source: Viking publisher's blurb)

Exhibitions

7979488
7979488

Notes

  • Youth is the second in Coetzee's memoir trilogy; it follows Boyhood : Scenes from Provincial Life and precedes Summertime. All three books were revised and published collectively under the title Scenes from Provincial Life in 2011.
  • Epigraph:

    Wer den Diechter will verstehen

    muß in Dicheters Lande gehen.

    • Goethe
  • Editions and translations have been updated for Youth: Scenes from Provincial Life by Eilish Copelin as part of a Semester 2, 2013 student internship. The selection and inclusion of these editions and translations was based on their availability through Australian libraries, namely through the search facilities of Libraries Australia and Trove (National Library of Australia).

    It has been further extended in the course of a 2014/15 project to create a comprehensive bibliography of Coetzee's works. We believe the record for the novel and its relationship to the revised version in Scenes of Provincial Life is now comprehensive. However, due to the enormous breadth of critical material on Coetzee's work, indexing of secondary sources is not complete.

    We are grateful for the author's and Indiana University's Professor Breon Mitchell's assistance in compiling this record.

Contents

* Contents derived from the Melbourne, Victoria,:Text Publishing , 2020 version. Please note that other versions/publications may contain different contents. See the Publication Details.
Introduction, Michael McGirr , single work essay

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

    • London,
      c
      England,
      c
      c
      United Kingdom (UK),
      c
      Western Europe, Europe,
      :
      Secker and Warburg ,
      2002 .
      image of person or book cover 2793094311085858369.jpg
      Image courtesy of publisher's website.
      Extent: 169p.
      Edition info: 1st UK ed.
      ISBN: 0436205823 (hbk), 9780436205828 (hbk), 0436275937 (pbk.), 9780436275937 (pbk.)
    • New York (City), New York (State),
      c
      United States of America (USA),
      c
      Americas,
      :
      Viking ,
      2002 .
      image of person or book cover 4869479281031017490.jpg
      This image has been sourced from online.
      Extent: 169p.
      Edition info: 1st American ed.
      ISBN: 067003102X (hbk), 9780670031023 (hbk)
    • New York (City), New York (State),
      c
      United States of America (USA),
      c
      Americas,
      :
      Penguin Books ,
      2003 .
      image of person or book cover 8221732439845394966.jpg
      Image courtesy of publisher's website.
      Extent: 169p.
      ISBN: 9780142002001 (pbk), 0142002003 (pbk)
    • London,
      c
      England,
      c
      c
      United Kingdom (UK),
      c
      Western Europe, Europe,
      :
      Vintage UK ,
      2003 .
      image of person or book cover 2630356258051764670.jpg
      Image courtesy of publisher's website.
      Extent: 169p.
      Note/s:
      • Dedication: Wen den Dichter will verstehen mub in Dichters Lande gehen. - Goethe
      ISBN: 0099433621, 9780099433620, 0099452049 (UK ed.), 9780099452041 (UK ed.)
    • Melbourne, Victoria,: Text Publishing , 2020 .
      image of person or book cover 299146455398268079.jpg
      This image has been sourced from online.
      Extent: 192p.
      Note/s:
      • Published 2 July 2020

      ISBN: 9781922330055
      Series: y separately published work icon Text Classics Text Publishing (publisher), Melbourne : Text Publishing , 2012- Z1851461 2012 series - publisher novel 'Great books by great Australian storytellers.' (Text website.)
Alternative title: Juventud
Language: Spanish
    • Barcelona,
      c
      Spain,
      c
      Western Europe, Europe,
      :
      Debolsillo ,
      2004 .
      image of person or book cover 2810660563250764660.jpg
      This image has been sourced from online.
      Extent: 205p.
      Reprinted: 2007 , 2011
      ISBN: 849793072X, 9788497930727
      Series: y separately published work icon Contemporánea Barcelona : Debolsillo , 1998 7994359 1998 series - publisher novel Number in series: 342/5
    • Barcelona,
      c
      Spain,
      c
      Western Europe, Europe,
      :
      Mondadori ,
      2004 .
      image of person or book cover 1266601601214682634.png
      This image has been sourced from online.
      Extent: 167p.
      ISBN: 9879397320, 9789879397329
    • Buenos Aires,
      c
      Argentina,
      c
      South America, Americas,
      :
      Debolsillo ,
      2010 .
      image of person or book cover 1298795403335392131.jpg
      Image courtesy of publisher's website.
      Extent: 208p.
      ISBN: 9875665398, 9789875665392
      Series: y separately published work icon Contemporánea Barcelona : Debolsillo , 1998 7994359 1998 series - publisher novel

Works about this Work

Art and the Female in Youth : Between Joyce and Beckett Paul Stewart , 2019 single work criticism
— Appears in: Reading Coetzee's Women 2019; (p. 71-86)
Writing the Self as Other : Autrebiography Paul Williams , 2019 single work criticism
— Appears in: TEXT : The Journal of the Australian Association of Writing Programs , October vol. 23 no. 2 2019;
'According to Roland Barthes, the autobiographic act of remembering and reclaiming the past commits the fallacy of conflating the author, narrator and protagonist, and giving the first two power over the latter. The past self is a fictional ‘other’, and the writing of memoir is a reading of the past self as a text. JM Coetzee therefore calls his meta-autobiographies (the three-part Scenes from a Provincial Life) autrebiographies, or ‘other-life-writing’. In this paper, I discuss the need for writers of memoir and autobiography to construct a past self as ‘other’, and argue for the impossibility of any kind of authentic representation of the ‘self’ in memoir or autobiography.' (Publication abstract)
 
“A Face Without Personality” : Coetzee’s Swiftian Narrators Gillian Dooley , Robert Phiddian , 2016 single work criticism
— Appears in: Ariel , July vol. 47 no. 3 2016; (p. 1-22)
'Much has been written about the complicated intertextual relationships between J. M. Coetzee’s novels and previous works by writers such as Franz Kafka, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Samuel Beckett, and, especially, Daniel Defoe. Relatively little has been written, in comparison, about any relationship between Coetzee and Defoe’s great contemporary, Jonathan Swift. We claim no extensive structural relationship between Coetzee’s novels and Swift’s works—nothing like the formal interlace between Robinson Crusoe and Foe, for example. We do claim, however, a strong and explicitly signalled likeness of narrative stance, marked especially by the ironic distance between author and protagonist in Gulliver’s Travels and Elizabeth Costello. We rehearse the extensive evidence of Coetzee’s attention to Swift (both in novels and criticism) and suggest that there is a Swiftian dimension to Coetzee’s oeuvre that is evident in several books, including Dusklands, Youth, Elizabeth Costello, and Diary of a Bad Year.' (Publication abstract)
Autofiction and Fictionalisation: J.M. Coetzee’s Novels and Boyhood Shadi Neimneh , 2015 single work criticism
— Appears in: Transnational Literature , May vol. 7 no. 2 2015;
Boyhood (1997), like Youth (2002), is J.M. Coetzee’s fictionalised ‘autobiography’. In this work, Coetzee – in a novelistic fashion – uses third-person narration and present tense to trace the development of his protagonist, John Coetzee, from boyhood to youth and question the formative impact of such years on the protagonist’s identity. The relationship between Coetzee the writer and Coetzee the character in the autobiographical memoirs is one of psychological doubling or mirroring. Therefore, and to borrow the title of Coetzee’s 2003 Nobel lecture, ‘he and his man’ are paired in a problematically intricate relationship evading, yet inviting, parallels. In his memoirs, Coetzee takes us through his protagonist’s school years in Worcester and Cape Town in South Africa, family upbringing, religious and political anxieties, social hesitations, and university years in Cape Town. Moreover, Coetzee traces his protagonist’s life in London as a computer programmer, attempts at writing poetry and reading literature, attempts at researching the works of the English novelist Ford Maddox Ford, and failed love affairs. In Boyhood, we see Coetzee’s boy as a school student between the ages of 10 and 13, struggling against his mother’s influence and her stifling love and internalising the shame and guilt of his family’s racist prejudice. The use of the third person to recount life details – with possible modifications to effect a middle ground between fiction and the search for self inherent in autobiographical writing – means using paradoxical styles. The term literary theorists use in this regard to describe this form of fictionalised autobiographies is ‘autofiction’. The term was coined in 1977 by French writer and critic Serge Doubrovsky with reference to his novel Fils. Recently, this term has been used by critics like Karen Ferreira-Meyers to indicate the blurring of boundaries between fact and fiction in texts. I suggest in this article that Coetzee's fictionalised memoirs can be called ‘autofiction’ just as his novels can be seen as somewhat autobiographical. Applied broadly, the term ‘autofiction’ can be used as a label for such genres, autobiographical novels and fictionalised autobiographies or memoirs, in the case of Coetzee. Although the term ‘autofiction’ is better applied to fictionalised or autobiographical memoirs,Coetzee’s fictions treating autobiographical themes also partake in this genre, though to a lesser extent.' (Author's introduction)
J. M. Coetzee, R. G. Howarth, South to South Nicholas Jose , 2014 single work criticism
— Appears in: New Scholar , vol. 3 no. 2 2014;

'R. G. (Guy) Howarth (1906-74) was a poet, scholar, teacher and advocate for Australian literature. He was foundation editor of Southerly from 1939 to 1956. From 1955 to 1971 he was Arderne Professor of English Literature in the University of Cape Town, a position he accepted after he was passed over for the prestigious Challis Chair at Sydney University in a disappointment that stayed with him to his premature end.

'In Cape Town Howarth continued his research on English and Australian literature, and began to teach South African writing. In 'Sisters of the South' (1958) he made a case for comparing Australian, New Zealand and South African literature. He introduced a course called Imaginative Writing which J.M. Coetzee took as a student. In Youth (2002), Coetzee's protagonist remembers: 'Howarth, who is an Australian, seems to have taken a liking to him, he cannot see why.' Howarth introduced Coetzee and other UCT students to Australian writers. He encouraged Coetzee to approach Prof Joseph Jones at the University of Texas at Austin about graduate study. Today Coetzee's archive sits with both Howarth's and Jones's in the Harry Ransom Center at UTA.

'Jones saw in Howarth the avatar of 'a new-type literary historian' who would be polymathically able to approach 'all literature in English-as a reticulated if not yet wholly integrated world-phenomenon'. For Coetzee, Howarth is an example of a teacher who 'may not have much of inherent significance to convey' yet can still 'exert a shaping influence on his students'. This long legacy re-opens the question of what happened in Sydney in 1951 where a road blocked for Howarth became a road ahead elsewhere.' (Publication abstract)

[Review] Youth : Scenes from Provincial Life David Sorfa , 2002 2002 single work review
— Appears in: Cercles 2000-;

— Review of Youth : Scenes from Provincial Life J. M. Coetzee , 2002 single work novel
Churned and Spurned in the Flexible World of Work : A Corporate Narrative Jane Messer , 2010 single work criticism
— Appears in: Cultural Studies Review , vol. 16 no. 2 2010;
'Accelerated by the new internet technologies, the past two decades have been characterised by a globalisation of trade and communications, along with major shifts in the balance between manufacturing and knowledge driven economies. New organisational cultures have grown out of and have reflexively driven these changes, and these new organisational cultures of work are registered and enacted by employees through a plethora of micro-practices in the workplace. While it is potentially empowering to be aware of the links between one's individual agency and the macro structure surrounding your own particular micro-experience, awareness is particularly hard to come by in the modern flexible workplace. Narrative can address this gap in felt knowledge, because in helping us have an imaginary about our experience as workers, narrative supports thinking more broadly about the contradictions inherent in the current system of globalised profit and productivity through flexible labour paradigm. Sociologist Richard Sennett and psychoanalyst Christophe Dejours's work on character and subjectivity are used here to frame the author's ethnographic research, which has included a series of extended interviews with IT executive salespeople in Sydney and brief workplace immersions, leading to a series of narratives of character; analysis of 'The IBM Global Human Capital Study 2008'; and excerpts from J.M. Coetzee's memoir Youth.' (Author's abstract)
y separately published work icon Acts of Visitation : The Narrative of J.M. Coetzee María J. López , Amsterdam New York (City) : Rodopi , 2011 Z1880004 2011 single work criticism

'This study traces, in J.M. Coetzee's fictional and non-fictional production, an imaginative and intellectual masterplot deriving from Coetzee's perception of European presence in (South) Africa as having its origin in an act of illegitimate penetration and fraudulent visitation. In Coetzee's novels, the historical and political problem of a hostile occupation and unfair distribution of the land finds a correspondence in the domestic space of house and farm, and the uneasy cohabitation of its occupants, along with the relation between hosts and guests. The seminal dimension of the categories of penetration and visitation is highlighted, as these are shown to operate not only on a spatial level but also on an epistemological, physical, psychological, hermeneutic, metafictional and ethical one: we encounter literary and psychological secrets that resist decipherment, bodies that cannot be penetrated, writers depicted as intruders, parents that ask to be welcomed by their children.
This study also identifies, in Coetzee's narrative, an ethical proposal grounded on a logic of excess and unconditionality - a logic of 'not enough' - lying behind certain acts of hospitality, friendship, kindness, care, and guidance to the gate of death, acts that may transform prevailing unequal socio-historical conditions and hostile personal relationships, characterized by a logic of parasitism and intrusion. As the figure of the writer progressively gains explicit prominence in Coetzee's literary production, special attention will be paid to it, as it alternately appears as secretary and master, migrant and intruder, pervert and foe, citizen and neighbour. Overall, Acts of Visitation analyzes how Coetzee's works depict the (South) African land, the Karoo farm, the familial household or the writer's and literary character's house as simultaneously contending and redemptive sites in which urgent historical, ethical, and metafictional issues are spatially explored and dramatized.' (Publishers' website)

Works published before Coetzee's arrival in Australia including, Dusklands, In the Heart of the Country, Waiting for the Barbarians, Life &​ Times of Michael K, Age of Iron, Disgrace, Foe, Boyhood and The Master of Petersburg are also discussed in this critical work.

The Grounds of Cynical Self-Doubt : J.M. Coetzee’s Boyhood, Youth and Summertime Sam Cardoena , 2014 single work criticism
— Appears in: Journal of Literary Studies , vol. 30 no. 1 2014; (p. 94-112)

'In this article, I argue that J.M. Coetzee’s autobiographical trilogy can be read as a set of texts in which the author responds to the problem of cynical self-doubt, as it is described in Coetzee’s writings on confession from the mid-1980s. Against Derek Attridge’s critical view of the relation between Coetzee’s autobiographies and these early writings, I argue that Coetzee’s texts do not passively abide by the author’s early scepticism, but rather inspect the grounds of cynical self-doubt and show its position to be intellectually confused. I specifically demonstrate that Coetzee’s texts present cynical self-doubt as an intellectualisation of akratic failure (weakness of will). The texts not only analyse the crisis from which cynical self-doubt emerges, but also try to look beyond a sceptical perspective. With this in mind, this article will read Coetzee’s autobiographies as writings that “aspire to a condition of gossip”. In this aspiration, the autobiographies point to an ethic of assent they themselves cannot yet fully inhabit.' (Author's abstract)

The Gate Deferred : J.M. Coetzee and the Battle Against Doubt Scott Esposito , 2013 single work criticism
— Appears in: Southerly , vol. 73 no. 3 2013; (p. 90-111)
'Esposito writes of Coetzee's characters (it is not Elizabeth Costello alone) in effect morally naked at the Gate, awaiting admission after - or so they think - the passing of a last judgement, but what is it that is expected of them, and what is this a gate to? (David Brooks, 'Editorial' p. 6)
J. M. Coetzee, R. G. Howarth, South to South Nicholas Jose , 2014 single work criticism
— Appears in: New Scholar , vol. 3 no. 2 2014;

'R. G. (Guy) Howarth (1906-74) was a poet, scholar, teacher and advocate for Australian literature. He was foundation editor of Southerly from 1939 to 1956. From 1955 to 1971 he was Arderne Professor of English Literature in the University of Cape Town, a position he accepted after he was passed over for the prestigious Challis Chair at Sydney University in a disappointment that stayed with him to his premature end.

'In Cape Town Howarth continued his research on English and Australian literature, and began to teach South African writing. In 'Sisters of the South' (1958) he made a case for comparing Australian, New Zealand and South African literature. He introduced a course called Imaginative Writing which J.M. Coetzee took as a student. In Youth (2002), Coetzee's protagonist remembers: 'Howarth, who is an Australian, seems to have taken a liking to him, he cannot see why.' Howarth introduced Coetzee and other UCT students to Australian writers. He encouraged Coetzee to approach Prof Joseph Jones at the University of Texas at Austin about graduate study. Today Coetzee's archive sits with both Howarth's and Jones's in the Harry Ransom Center at UTA.

'Jones saw in Howarth the avatar of 'a new-type literary historian' who would be polymathically able to approach 'all literature in English-as a reticulated if not yet wholly integrated world-phenomenon'. For Coetzee, Howarth is an example of a teacher who 'may not have much of inherent significance to convey' yet can still 'exert a shaping influence on his students'. This long legacy re-opens the question of what happened in Sydney in 1951 where a road blocked for Howarth became a road ahead elsewhere.' (Publication abstract)

Last amended 11 Jun 2020 13:57:40
Subjects:
  • c
    South Africa,
    c
    Southern Africa, Africa,
  • 1950-1965
Settings:
  • London,
    c
    England,
    c
    c
    United Kingdom (UK),
    c
    Western Europe, Europe,
  • 1960-1970
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