Kannemeyer coetzee biography sample

J.M. Coetzee’s 2001 essay collection Stranger Shores begins with the text of a lecture he gave a decade earlier in Graz, Austria.

Its title – ‘What is a Classic?’ – alludes to T.S. Eliot’s 1944 lecture of the same name, in which Eliot considers Virgil as an example of a poet whose writing has transcended its historical moment.

In Eliot’s account, a classic is more than just a work that has endured; it has an importance that is at once literary and historical.

Kannemeyer coetzee biography sample pdf

Virgil is thus a classic in a way that no English writer, not even Shakespeare, can claim to be – indeed, he is ‘the classic of all Europe’ – because his poetry is the mature expression of a mature civilisation. He is ‘the consciousness of Rome and the supreme voice of her language’: a pivotal figure whose work reaches back to the pagan civilisation of ancient Greece and whose influence flows into the Christian era that succeeded his own.

He qualifies as a classic b