J.M. Coetzee’s Jesus Trilogy as Meta-Utopia

Abstract

The present article argues that J.M. Coetzee’s fictions The Childhood of Jesus (2013), The Schooldays of Jesus (2016) and The Death of Jesus (2019) have a typical form of meta-utopia in the context of Coetzee’s living during apartheid censorship and his affinity for the Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky and for the radical conditions in which the Russian literature was written during the Soviet regime and Nicholas II’s reign. Furthermore, the article uses the morphology of the utopian genre identified by Corin Braga as a method of analysis to underline the complexity of a meta-utopian structure where eutopia, dystopia, outopia and antiutopia are present in the same narrative world.

Keywords

• j.m. coetzee
• jesus trilogy
• morphology of the utopian genre
• meta-utopia
• edith clowes
• corin braga