López, María J. (Dr.)

Profile

I am Senior Lecturer at the Department of English of the University of Córdoba, where I graduated with honours in English. In 2004, I obtained a research scholarship to pursue my doctoral studies, focused on the work of J.M. Coetzee. During this 4-year period, I was visiting researcher at the Department of Critical Theory and Cultural Studies of the University of Nottingham (UK), the Department of English of the University of Duke (US), and the Department of English of the University of York (UK). I have also visited the “Coetzee Collective” at the University of Cape Town and the “National English Literary Museum” in Grahamstown (South Africa), the University of New South Wales (Australia), and the School of Oriental and African Studies (London). My research has mainly focused on the work of J.M. Coetzee, but I have also written on other South African writers, such as Zoë Wicomb, Zakes Mda and Phaswane Mpe, and on authors coming from other postcolonial contexts, such as Salman Rushdie, Anita Desai and Patrick White. I have also developed a parallel research line on modernist British fiction, paying attention to Virginia Woolf and Samuel Beckett.

Research Interests

South African literature in English. Postcolonial literature. British modernism. Communitarian theories and deconstruction.

Current Projects

Research Projects

"Democracy, Secrecy and Dissidence in Contemporary Literature in English" (2019-2022), Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (PID2019-104526GB-I00)
“Community and Immunity in the Contemporary Novel in English” (2010-1012), Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (FFI2009-13244)
“Individual and Community in Modernist Fiction in English” (2013-2015), Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (ref. FFI2012-36765)
“Secrecy and community in contemporary narrative in English” (2016-2019), Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (FFI2016-75589-P), Main researcher.

Publications

Books and Editions

Secrecy and Community in 21st-Century Fiction, edited by María J. López and Pilar Villar-Argáiz. Bloomsbury, 2021.
New Perspectives on Community and the Modernist Subject: Finited, Singular, Explosed. Edited by Gerardo Rodríguez-Salas, Paula Martín-Salván and María J. López. Routledge, 2018.
Co-edition with Kai Wiegandt of special number “J.M. Coetzee and the non-English Literary Traditions.” European Journal of English Studies 20.2 (2016).
Acts of Visitation: The Narrative of J.M. Coetzee (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2011)
Derek Attridge: La singularidad de la literatura (Madrid: Abada, 2011), translator and editor.
La escritura de lo inhóspito: Ensayos sobre la narrativa de J.M. Coetzee, editor. Madrid: Abada Editores, 2010.

Articles in Journals

“Moving in ‘a forest of hieroglyphs’: Enigmatic and mutable signs of identity in Zoë Wicomb’s Playing in the Light.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 55.5 (2019): 710-722.
“The ‘Deadly Secret’ of the Prophecy: Performative and Parabolic Language in Chigozie Obioma’s The Fishermen.” Theory Now: Journal of Literature, Critique and Thought 2.2 (2019): 148-164.
“Introduction: J.M. Coetzee, Intertextuality and the Non-English Literary Traditions.” European Journal of English Studies 20.2 (2016): 113-126.
The Gothic, the Abject and the Monstrous: A Revision of National Identity in Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts.” English Studies 97.5 (2016): 493-509
and Gerardo Rodríguez: “‘A Queer Sense of Being Like’: Female Friendship in Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf.” Virginia Woolf Miscellany 86 (Fall 2014/Winter 2015): 19-21.
“‘Their travels were real travels’: History and Fiction in J.M. Coetzee’s ‘The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee’ and in European Exploration Narratives in Southern Africa.” The Grove: Working Papers on English Studies 21 (2014): 101-115.
“Miguel de Cervantes and J.M. Coetzee: An Unacknowledged Paternity.” Journal of Literary Studies 29.4 (2013): 80-97.
“Samuel Beckett’s Trilogy, Alain Badiou and the Subtraction from the State and the Community.” Estudios Irlandeses 8 (2013): 32-42. http://www.estudiosirlandeses.org/2013/03/samuel-becketts-trilogy-alain-badiou-and-the-subtraction-from-the-state-and-the-community/
“Communities of mourning and vulnerability: Zakes Mda’s Ways of Dying and Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow.” English in Africa 40.1 (May 2013): 99-117.
“J.M. Coetzee’s Summertime: Mistranslation, Linguistic Unhousedness and the Extraterritorial Literary Community.” Atlantis: Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies 35.1 (June 2013): 51-67. http://www.atlantisjournal.org/index.php/atlantis/article/view/50/43
“‘You are one of us’: Communities of Marginality, Vulnerability and Secrecy in Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace.” English Studies in Canada 38.2 (June 2012): 157-177.
“Can We Be Friends Here? Visitation and Hospitality in J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace.” Journal of Southern African Studies 36.4 (December 2010): 923-938. Terence Ranger Prize 2010
“Foe: A Ghost Story.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 45.2 (June 2010): 295-310.
“‘You can get lost in Cape Town’: Transculturation and Dislocation in Zoë Wicomb’s Works.” Afroeuropa: Journal of Afroeuropean Studies 2.3 (2008)
“The Waters of the Mind: Rhetorical Patterns of Fluidity in Woolf, William James, Bergson and Freud”. PsyArt: A Hyperlink Journal for the Psychological Study of the Arts,article071119.(2008) http://www.psyartjournal.com/article/show/jess_lpez_snchez_vizcano-the_waters_of_the_mind_rhetorical_patter

Essays in Collected Books

“Introduction: Secrecy and Community in Twenty-First-Centuy Fiction.” Secrecy and Community in 21st-Century Fiction. Edited by María J. López and Pilar Villar-Argáiz. Bloomsbury, 2021, 1-19.
“Virginia Woolf y la voz interrumpida de la comunidad”. Metáforas de la multitud: En torno al pensamiento de Antonio Negri. Ed. Miguel Corrella. Lengua de trapo, 2020, 279-296.
“Between the Local and the Global: Recent Trends in the African Novel in English.” Rura Cano, Rurisque Deos: Homenaje a José Luis Cantón Alonso. Ed. Ramón Román Alcalá y Mª del Carmen Molina Barea. UCOPress, 2020, 343-363.
‘God knows whether there is a Dulcinea in this world or not’: Idealized Passion and Undecidable Desire in J.M. Coetzee.” Reading Coetzee’s Women. Edited by Sue Kossew and Belinda Harvey. Palgrave Macmillan, 2019, 165-182.
“The Ghostly, the Uncanny and the Abject in Jean Rhys’s After Leaving Mr Mackenzie.” Visitors from beyond the Grave: Ghosts in World Literature. Edited by Dámaris Romero-González, Israel Muñoz-Gallarte and Gabriel Laguna-Mariscal. Imprensa da Universidade de Coimbra, 2019, 211-222.
“Introduction: Who’s Afraid of the Modernist Community?” In New Perspectives on Community and the Modernist Subject: Finited, Singular, Explosed. Edited by Gerardo Rodríguez-Salas, Paula Martín-Salván and María J. López. (Routledge, 2018): 1-20.
“The Search for ‘The Common Voice’: The Storyteller, Community and (Pre)Medieval Echoes in the Work of Virginia Woolf.” In New Perspectives on Community and the Modernist Subject: Finited, Singular, Explosed. Edited by Gerardo Rodríguez-Salas, Paula Martín-Salván and María J. López. (Routledge, 2018): 74-89.
“Oralidad, tradición y protesta política: El cuento (sud)africano en inglés.” In Fragmentos de realidad: Los autores y las poéticas del cuento en lengua inglesa, ed. Santiago Rodríguez Guerrero-Strachan. (Valladolid: Ediciones Universidad Valladolid, 2015): 173-189.
“Doomed to Walk the Night: Ghostly Communities and Promises in the Novels of Alex La Guma.” In Community in 20th Century Fiction, ed. Paula Martín, Gerardo Rodríguez & Julián Jiménez. (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2013):123-140.
“‘I am not a herald of community’: Communities of Contagion and Touching in the Letters of J.M. Coetzee.” In Community in 20th Century Fiction, ed. Paula Martín, Gerardo Rodríguez & Julián Jiménez. (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2013): 238-254.
“Writers, Friends and Lovers: Virginia Woolf, G.E. Moore and the Aesthetics of Personal Relations.” In Ethics of Alterity, Confrontation and Responsibility in 19th- to 21st-century British Literature, ed. Christine Reynier & Jean-Michel Ganteau. (Montpellier: Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée, 2013): 107-119.
“J.M. Coetzee and Patrick White: Explorers, Settlers, Guests.” In Strong Opinions: J.M. Coetzee and the Authority of Contemporary Fiction, ed. Chris Danta, Sue Kossew & Julian Murphet (New York: Continuum, 2011): 35-49.
“J.M. Coetzee: La anegación de la historia y la libertad de la literatura.” In La escritura de lo inhóspito: Ensayos sobre la narrativa de J.M. Coetzee. Ed. María Jesús López Sánchez-Vizcaíno (Madrid: Abada Editores, 2010): 101-130.
“Lonely Londoners Trapped in Displacement: Material and Subjective Spaces in Rhys, Selvon and Coetzee”. In Hybridation, Multiculturalisme, Postcolonialisme, ed. Héliane Ventura, Didier Lassalle & Karin Fischer (Orléans: Presses Universitaires d’Orléans, 2009): 111-124.
“Magic realism revisited. Recreations of history in Midnight’s Children”. In Figures of Belatedness: Postmodernist Fiction in English, ed. Javier Gascueña Gahete & Paula Martín Salván (Córdoba: Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Córdoba, 2006): 169-188.
“She had been certain the river would sustain her: Modernist Aestheticism in Anita Desai’s Fiction”. In India in the World, ed. Cristina Gámez & Antonia Navarro (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011): 173-181.

Translations

Translation of “Memories We Lost” by Lidudumalingani Mqombothi. Revolución y Cultura 2 (2017), 70-75.
Translation of Joseph Conrad’s “The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’”. Ed. Paula Martín Salván. Madrid: Abada editores, 2009.
Translation of Joseph Hillis Miller’s article “El coloquio de los perros como narrativa posmoderna.” In La tropelía: Hacia El Coloquio de los perros, ed. Julián Jiménez Heffernan. Madrid: Artemisa ediciones, 2008. 33-98.

Other publications

Review of Relatos y textos para nada, by Samuel Beckett, trans. José Francisco Fernández (Valencia: JPM Ediciones, 2015), Estudios Irlandeses 11 (2016), 240-243.
Review of Mercier y Camier, by Samuel Beckett, trans. José Francisco Fernández (Málaga: Editorial Confluencias, 2013), Estudios Irlandeses 9 (2014), 163-165.
“A Different Southern Africa: Review of The Ethics of Dissident Desire in Southern African Writing, Dobrota Pucherová (Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2011).” Matatu 41 (2013): 530-533.
Review of Sueño con mujeres que ni fu ni fa, by Samuel Beckett, trans. José Francisco Fernández y Miguel Martínez-Lage (Barcelona: Tusquets Editores, 2011), Estudios Irlandeses 7 (2012): 161-163.
Review of On the Turn: The Ethics of Fiction in Contemporary Narrative in English, eds Bárbara Arizti & Silvia Martínez-Falquina (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007), Atlantis 32.3 (December 2010): 169-74.