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Donald Powers Donald Powers i(6376418 works by)
Gender: Male
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1 Beyond the Death of the Author : Summertime and J. M. Coetzee's Afterlives Donald Powers , 2016 single work criticism
— Appears in: Life Writing , vol. 13 no. 3 2016; (p. 323-334) 'This paper begins by exploring via Roland Barthes's eponymous book about himself the implications of the premise of J. M. Coetzee's novel Summertime that the author John Coetzee is dead. I show how Summertime’s fragmented structure and echoes from Coetzee's earlier novels undermine the idea of a coherent authorial subject, and how emigration and acts of translation in the novel are central to how Coetzee's personality, life, and work are interpreted. The paper goes on to examine the influence of Nabokov's work on Coetzee's later fictions, with an emphasis on the interplay between Nabokov's actual and fictionalised struggles with his biographers. The paper concludes by arguing that J. C. Kannemeyer's biography of Coetzee, notwithstanding its claims to objective detachment, cannot but be read as a text scripted in the spirit of Coetzee's novel. ...'
1 Emigration and Photography in J.M. Coetzee’s Slow Man Donald Powers , 2013 single work criticism
— Appears in: Journal of Postcolonial Writing , vol. 49 no. 4 2013; (p. 458-469) 'This article examines how photographs in J.M. Coetzee’s novel Slow Man focus questions about the muteness and mutability of the historical record, particularly in the context of migrancy, while elaborating the metafictional dynamic between the protagonist Paul Rayment and his nominal author Elizabeth Costello. Drawing on the work on photography of Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes and Susan Sontag, the article argues that the dispute among the characters over Drago’s “forgery” of one of Rayment’s Fauchery photographs foregrounds how the past, in the retrievable form of a static photographic image, is available for reinterpretation and reconfiguring in the present. Whereas in the novels of a writer like W.G. Sebald black-and-white photographs are included as a sign of the silence around personal histories touched by communal trauma, in Slow Man colourless photographs function as a thematic motif to highlight such silences, and more centrally to emphasize how a personal history can be as readily assimilated to a collective history as superimposed over it.' (Editor's abstract)
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