In three of J.M. Coetzee's recent novels, Disgrace (1999), Elizabeth Costello (2003), and Slow Man (2005), the South African author explores notions of authorship and challenges the possibilities of the sympathetic imagination. The notion of the sympathetic imagination has roots in Romanticism, and it connotes inhabiting another in order to understand or interpret. Romantic poet John Keats described the poet as "continually in for [sic] and filling some other body" (Letter to Richard Woodhouse), and Coetzee addresses the notion of the sympathetic imagination in his work. There are two facets of the sympathetic imagination: that which governs social relations and that which authors and creative minds attempt to claim as a driving force behind their work. It is important not to conflate the two separate facets of the sympathetic imagination. The social facet encourages good citizenship and allows humankind to behave in humane ways. It counters one's private desire for mastery and balances self-interest with self-sacrifice; the sympathetic imagination helps others attain their goals and places others' needs alongside one's own selfishness. A sympathetic imagination is an essential quality in society, yet it will always yield only partial success. It cannot achieve complete success because truly inhabiting and embodying another living person is simply impossible, but in fiction, Coetzee explores the possibilities and limits of the sympathetic imagination at the level of language and metaphor. The other facet of the sympathetic imagination is often claimed by authors, poets, and artists to allow them to inhabit the subjects of their creativity. Coetzee tests the limits of authorial claims that writing is accomplished by applying a sympathetic imagination. In doing so, he creates metaphysical frames in which his own author-characters interact with other characters to reveal that some characters resist being written. In these metaphysical frames of fiction, Coetzee suggests that an author's sympathetic imagination will never have total success; he sets forth a notion of partial success that helps address what is gained when the sympathetic imagination runs up against limits. My argument is that the authors and characters in these three novels attempt acts of sympathetic imagination and recurrently encounter limits. Coetzee questions perceived notions of authorship and the possibilities of the sympathetic imagination without offering alternatives. He critiques common notions of authorship and character writing but offers no real solutions.

In 2003, the South African writer J.M. Coetzee was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for his riveting portrayals of racial repression, sexual politics, the guises of reason, and the hypocrisy of human beings toward animals and nature, Coetzee was credited with being "a scrupulous doubter, ruthless in his criticism of the cruel rationalism and cosmetic morality of western civilization." The film of his novel Disgrace, starring John Malkovich, brought his challenging ideas to a new audience. Anton Leist and Peter Singer have assembled an outstanding group of contributors who probe deeply into Coetzee's extensive and extra ordinary corpus. They explore his approach to ethical theory and philosophy and Pay Particular attention to his representation of the human-animal relationship. They also confront Coetzee's depiction of the elementary conditions of life, the origins of morality, the recognition of value in others, the sexual dynamics between men and women, the normality of suppression, and possibility of equality in postcolonial society, With its wide-ranging consideration of philosphical issues, especially in relation to fiction, this volume stands alone in its extraordinary exchange of ethical and literary inquiry. This collection takes stock of J.M. Coetzee's impact from a number of interesting angles, Including animals, sexuality, race, and reason. The time is truly ripe for such a volume. Philosophers Who are interested Coetzee's work will find these essays useful for their own research, and readers of Coetzee who share an interest in philosophy will be able to further explore those interests."-Matthew Calarco, California State University at Fullerton, and author of Zoographies: The Question of the Animal from Heidegger to Derrida

J. M. Coetzee and the Idea of the Public Intellectual addresses the contribution Coetzee has made to contemporary literature, not least for the contentious forays his work makes into South African political discourse and the field of postcolonial studies.

J.M. Coetzee has new things to say about this relation between the ‘real’ and ‘fictions of the real’, and while much has already been written about him, these questions need to be more fully explored. The contributions to this volume are drawn together by the idea of the hinge between the world (whether understood in ontological, bio-ethical, personal and interpersonal, or socio-political terms) and fictional representations of it (whether understood in epistemological, ficto-biographical, formal, or stylistic terms). In this collection, the question of understanding itself — how we understand or imagine our place in the world — is shown to be central to our conception of that world. That is, rather than beginning with forms developed in socio-political understandings, Coetzee’s works ask us to consider what role fiction might play in relation to politics, in relation to history, in relation to ethics and our understanding of human agency and responsibility. Coetzee has a profound interest in the methods through which we make sense of the contemporary world and our place in it, and his approach appeals to readers of fiction, critics and philosophers alike. The central problems he deals with in his fiction are of the kind that confront people everywhere and so involve a "translatability" that allow the works to maintain relevance across cultures. Added to this, though, his fiction makes us question the nature of understanding itself. This book was originally published as a special issue of Textual Practice.

How is it that we feel with fictional characters and so approve or disapprove of their actions? For many British Enlightenment thinkers writing at a time when sympathy was the pivot of ethics as well as poetics, this question was crucial. Asserting that the notion of the sympathetic imagination prominent in Romantic criticism and poetry originates in Moral Sentimentalism, this study traces the emergence of what became a key concept of intersubjectivity. It shows how, contrary to earlier traditions, Francis Hutcheson and his disciples successively established the imagination rather than reason as the pivotal faculty through which sympathy is rendered morally effective. Writing at the interface of ethics and poetics, Adam Smith, Lord Kames and others explored the sympathetic imagination as a means of both explaining emotional reader response and discovering moral distinctions. As a result, the sentimental novel became the sight of ethical controversy. Arguing against the dominant view of research which claims that the novel of sensibility is mostly uncritically sentimental, the book demonstrates that it is precisely in this genre that the sympathetic imagination is sceptically assessed in terms of its literary and moral potential.

Discusses animal rights through essays, fiction, and fables from a variety of perspectives in fields such as philosophy, religion, and science