Epistemology and Ontology in Virginia Woolf's "Flush" and John Maxwell Coetzee's "Summertime". Examples for unconventional modernist and postmodernist life-writing (PDF)

Essay from the year 2020 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,0, Christian-Albrechts-University of Kiel, language: English, abstract: This essay aims to explore how the biographical texts "Flush" by Virginia Woolf and "Summertime" by John Maxwell Coetzee respond to (post-)modernist concerns and how the texts transgress previous conceptions and genre boundaries concerning the contradiction of fact and fictionality in life-writing. I will show how Woolf, by depicting the life and perceptions of a dog, playfully comments and criticizes previous conventions of life-writing. Coetzee goes even further and takes the reader on a journey through the process of constructing the written representation of a life.

Thereby reflecting upon the multiple perspectives and inaccuracies the biographical representation of 'a life', or, in case of autobiography, 'the self', necessarily includes. By exemplary comparing Woolf's linear 'mock-biography' "Flush" with Coetzee's "highly fragmented self-representation" "Summertime", the evolution of the genre of life-writing from modernism to postmodernism and the shift from epistemological to ontological concerns will be outlined.