Product Description
The South African novelist and Nobel Laureate J. M. Coetzee is widely studied around the world and attracts considerable critical attention. With the publication of Disgrace Coetzee began to enjoy popular as well as critical acclaim, but his work can be as challenging as it is impressive. This book is addressed to students and readers of Coetzee: it is an up-to-date survey of the writer's fiction and context, written accessibly for those new to his work. All of the fiction is discussed, and the brooding presence of the political situation in South Africa, during the first part of his career, is given serious attention in a comprehensive account of the author's main influences. The revealing strand of confessional writing in the latter half of Coetzee's career is given full consideration. This Introduction will help new readers understand and appreciate one of the most important and challenging authors in contemporary literature. ... Read more

Product Description
In these two novellas he distils the absurdity and horror of scientific evangelism and heroic exploration united in a terrible marriage of destruction. By the author of "Life and Times of Michael K" winner of the Booker Prize. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (9)

Dusky Dawn
Being Coetzee's first work of fiction, Dusklands marks the signs of a debut work. It consists of two separate narratives set in different times and places, but united by a common theme of racist oppression. The first narrative is set in Vietnam, during the Vietnam War. The U.S. is shown as a colonial power and the Vietnamese are shown to be suffering under its attacks. The protagonist is a captain, who sees the `truth' and tries to convince the authorities to see it too, but predictably fails. Driven into frustration he kills his own son.
In the other narrative, a seventeenth century white explorer leads an expedition in the heart of the native territory. A petty incident is interpreted by him as an attack on the Empire and in a second attack he destroys the entire tribe, including his former servants.

The narratives are hard to read and it's not easy to keep track of events, especially if we compare it with other works of Coetzee. Language is obstructive at some places and the reader has certain difficulties in muddling through the text.

Coetzee's vehement anti-Americanism shows the fervor of 1970s and Coetzee's own youthful convictions. His leftist sympathies are clear and one feels that the parallels drawn between the apartheid regime of South Africa and the U.S. Government are forced and artificial.

First of all, the blacks have equal rights in the U.S. and the State does not discriminate against them. The apartheid regime had occupied the land of Africa, driven out the natives, killing indiscriminately and extirpating a lot of cultures and tribes. We have no such equivalent in Vietnam War. The U.S. did not kill innocent civilians. It did not displace people by transplanting American people on the Vietnamese land. It did not try to convert the natives.

Secondly, the Vietnam War was initiated by the Communists. Soviet Union and China were the clear aggressors. In a post-1945 world, they had blatantly tried to overrun a free country torturing and massacring thousands of locals who opposed the Communist invaders. The U.S. jumped in only to prevent another country becoming Communist. In the process, it saved Vietnam the pain of a nationwide cultural destruction, like of which China had to suffer during the Cultural Revolution. There were some tactical mistakes on the part of the U.S., but the Vietnam War was a Communist folly. The U.S. had to pay for a crime of communists. It was due to the heavily biased leftist media of the Cold War era, which through selective reporting turned the public opinion of Americans against their own country.

After failing to gain a foothold in Vietnam, KGB's main focus was to slander America in which it succeeded. Many of the journalists and academicians were on the payroll of the Communists; many others with humanist concerns were swept away in the mass hysteria of 1970s' anti-Americanism. Coetzee was one of such gullible humanists.
This work should be seen in this light; keeping in mind that the author had strong leftist sympathies and commitment when he wrote this work.

The Beginning Of An Amazing Literary Career
These two short novels, one about a writer going through a messy divorce and the other about an 18th century frontiersman and the Hottentots he has to deal with, are tied together by the single act of violence on which their stories turn. Both stories involve the power their protagonists understand they wield, and their shaky hold on that power, over themselves, their dependents and the world they inhabit, and their ultimate succumbing to that power serves as both stories' climax.

The second story, "The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee," is paced better than "Vietnam Project," but both stories are a little stilted and detached from themselves in places, which runs a little counter to the thrust of the stories themselves. Yes, that's nitpicking -- I recommend this short volume otherwise without reservation -- but having read his utterly amazing and fully realized novel "Disgrace," these two stories, his first published works, show a writer not yet at the height of his powers. Just know that, unlike the main characters in these two stories, J.M. Coetzee eventually gets there.

Inspiring
This book is very inspiring, very deep and very complex. I lked more "In the heart of the country".

By the way, the guy down here (writesbooksforfood) that rated it one star and barks against J L Borges (you can imagine) also rated another book: "How to improve your racquetball". You can imagine a guy that reads that kind of books, and later he goes and tries to enjoy Borges or Coetzee? My god.

Power's subtle threads of meaning
DUSKLANDS is Coetzee's first book, and it is in some significant ways different from some of his other works, though alike in others. It is a meditation on power, colonialism, the brutal meeting of cultures that occurs when imperialist goals are served and also a study of language, language's conveyance of power and propaganda as well as "self-propaganda" or delusion. It is more oblique in its themes and points, though, than even "In the Heart of the Country," I think.

The book is broken into two distinct sections. The first is a first-person narrative by an Amercian propagandist for a (government?) project about Vietnam and how the native people there can be influenced in favor of the invading army, the United States. The propagandist is an unhappy and an unappealing narrator. He has problems with his marriage, and the artfulness of his work is not respected by his superior, a fictional "Coetzee," who tells him that he needs to be plainer in language and subtler in idea for the military personnel who will read his assessment. The report is included in the narrative, and one can read the narrator's (who works in the field of "mythography") focus on cultural myth as a motivator and shaper of a people's beliefs and the outcomes of those beliefs (behaviors).

And so we must ask ourselves what is the mythology of the man who is writing this report? We see his eventual break with his routine and society by the end of this section, and his own mythology in his trying to heal that break in his own mind. Coetzee, the author, begs the question here of what the narrator's break has to do with the subject of his report, colonialism and its attendant propaganda, both public and "self," in Vietnam.

The second section of this slim book (125 pages), "The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee," is the story of a Boer frontiersman in the 1700s who means to take revenge on the native people because they have slighted his superiority as a white man. This section has more of narrative plot line as we follow the journey and its outcome, but deals, again, with the themes of colonialism, power, cultural identity and communication. Given the insertion of the Coetzee character again in this section, I was left to wonder what this means? Is Coetzee saying he is heir to the imperialism of his ancestors? Is he saying we are indistinguishable as individuals if we inherit the benefits of the sin of colonialism? I don't know...

This was a more challenging read for me than I have found with other books by Coetzee, but it was very rewarding, especially now as our nation copes with the consequences of the means through which imperialism asserts itself in a globalizing world. I recommend this book, but not as a first look at Coetzee.

Dark and incisive
"Dusklands" consists of two very different parts. In "The Vietnam Project", Mr Coetzee tells the story of Eugene Dawn, a specialist in psychological warfare whose task it is to establish a document called the Vietnam Project dealing with the so-called Phase IV of the Vietnam conflict in the years 1973-1974. To give his imagination a helpful impulse, Dawn carries with him photographs that will illustrate the report. They show gruesome scenes of the war like for example sergeant Clifford Houston copulating with a Vietnamese woman or two other sergeants, Berry and Wilson, posing with several severed Vietnamese heads as trophies. But soon Dawn is driven to breakdown and madness by the stress of this macabre project to win the war in Vietnam. After having been driven to a nearly fatal assault on his child Martin, Dawn is placed in an institution. The text closes with Dawn reflecting as follows: "I have high hopes of finding whose fault I am."
"The narrative of Jacobus Coetzee" is actually a translation from Afrikaans by J.M. Coetzee of a text published in 1762. It is the account of a hideous vengeance of a frontiersman on a tribe of Hottentots in South Africa.
Both Eugene Dawn in the 1970s and Jacobus Coetzee in the 1760s are dealers in death who claim their humanity and impressively express their feelings of guilt. ... Read more

Product Description
Nadine Gordimer has written of J.M. Coetzee that his "vision goes to the nerve-centre of being. What he finds there is more than most people will ever know about themselves, and he conveys it with a brilliant writer's mastery of tension and elegance". "Doubling the Point" takes the reader to the center of that vision. These essays and interviews, documenting Coetzee's longtime engagement with his own culture, and with modern culture in general, constitute a literary autobiography. Centrally concerned with the form and content of fiction, "Doubling the Point" provides insight into the significance of certain writers (particularly modernists such as Kafka, Musil, and Beckett), the value of intellectual movements (from structuralism and structural linguistics on through deconstruction), and the issues of political involvement and responsibility - not only for Coetzee's own work, but for fiction writing in general. In interviews prefacing each section of the book, Coetzee reflects on the essays to follow and relates them to his life and work. In these interviews editor David Attwell prompts from Coetzee answers of depth and interest.The result is the story of a fiction writer's intellectual development, and of an intellectual's literary development. It is the story of how one writer has moved through the scholarly and political trends of the last 30 years, carefully assessing their applications and limitations, and through this experience forged for himself a unique and powerful literary voice informed in equal parts by life and learning. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

The great world and its concerns
This book covers as diverse subjects as sports (rugby's political importance in South-Africa), pop culture (`Captain America as a great flag-wrapped phallus'), advertising (creating identifications and associations in the consumer), linguistics and postmodern theories (`The Rhetoric of the Passive in English'), comments on censorship (`The Taint of the Pornographic'), personal remembrances (Coetzee's US years as a student) and reviews of other writer's work (Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Rousseau, Musil, Kafka, D.H. Lawrence, A. Fugard, N. Gordimer, S. Beckett, B. Breytenbach, A. La Guma and others).

It shows were J.M. Coetzee stood as a writer and as an individual at the end of the 1980s, just before the publication of one of his masterpieces `Age of Iron'.

Contrary to another writer who dissects during 43 pages his dominant feeling of nothingness (in a period of war!!!), the morass of linguistics (as an important philosopher remarked: linguistics equals the cleaning of one's spectacles) didn't turn J.M. Coetzee from `the great world and its concerns'. He took to heart G. Lukácz's position on realism: `one's first duty as a writer is to express social and historical processes; drawing the procedures of representation into question is time-wasting.'
An author should express `the truth as he sees it'. He `must take freedom from the public conformity of political interpretations, morals and tastes.' Therefore, he must be against censorship and its alleged function of protecting the State, a community, a society.
While others continued to be stuck in the morass, J. M. Coetzee tackled essential human problems as individual, political and social violence, sexuality, racism, dictatorship, justice, political monopolies, colonialism, human destiny (child, youth, aging and death) and the function of writing itself, head-on.

I have only a few comments on this thought-provoking book.
The world doesn't behave as mathematics predict it. As J. von Neumann said: `mathematical formulation necessarily represents only a theory of some phase (aspects) of reality, and not reality itself.'
Philosophically speaking, truth is correspondence with the facts (A. Tarski), with what happened, happens and will happen. Dreams, thoughts, wishes ... are also facts. There is no endless series of supplements that defers the truth.

This book is a must read for all Coetzee fans and lovers of world literature.

N.B. Some texts on censorship have been reprinted in Coetzee's `Giving Offense'.
... Read more

Product Description
In September 2003 the South African novelist J. M. Coetzee was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, confirming his reputation as one of the most influential writers of our time. J. M. Coetzee and the Idea of the Public Intellectual addresses the contribution Coetzee has made to contemporary literature, not least for the contentious forays his work makes into South African political discourse and the field of postcolonial studies. Taking the author’s ethical writing as its theme, the volume is an important addition to understanding Coetzee’s fiction and critical thinking. While taking stock of Coetzee’s singular, modernist response to the apartheid and postapartheid situations in his early fiction, the volume is the first to engage at length with the later works, Disgrace, The Lives of Animals, and Elizabeth Costello. J. M. Coetzee and the Idea of the Public Intellectualexplores Coetzee’s roles as a South African intellectual and a novelist; his stance on matters of allegory and his evasion of the apartheid censor; his tacit critique of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission; his performance of public lectures of his alter ego, Elizabeth Costello; and his explorations into ecofeminism and animal rights. The essays collected here, which include an interview with the Nobel Laureate, provide new vantages from which to consider Coetzee’s writing. ... Read more

Product Description
This book presents a clearly written introduction to the novel's themes and form, inspired by the author's practical experience of several years of teaching the novel at university level in Britain, as well as his background as a South African-born and educated academic. One of the most widely read novels by a South African-born writer or 'about' South Africa, Nobel Laureate J.M. Coetzee's (second) Booker Prize-winning novel, "Disgrace" (1999), is a firm favourite with reading groups and a fixture on many university-level courses on postcolonial or international literatures in English. Sometimes regarded as offering a bleak picture of post-apartheid South Africa, "Disgrace" has also been read as an ultimately hopeful novel about renunciation and redemption. This introduction offers an indispensable guide to the historical contexts and critical ideas necessary for an informed and rewarding engagement with one of the most significant novels of the last quarter century.Offering an overview of the author's career, informed discussion of the novel's setting and references, this guide considers such issues as the representation of race, gender, the land, and animals, and its concern with language, power, music, confession, and allegory. It provides a discussion of the novel's critical and popular reception, a comprehensive guide to further reading, and questions for discussion. ... Read more

Product Description
In his acceptance speech for the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature, J. M. Coetzee delivered an intriguing and enigmatic short story, "He and His Man." The story features Robinson Crusoe, long after his return from the island, reflecting on death and spectacle, writing and allegory, solitude and sociability, as he searches his mind for some true understanding of the "man" who writes of and for him. In the spare and powerful prose for which Coetzee is renowned, The Nobel Lecture in Literature, 2003 is a provocative testament to the uncompromising vision of one of the world’s most profound writers. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

A speech in the form of an allegorical story
Coetze does not make the usual direct statement on the role of the writer and the situation of mankind. Instead he tells a story of Robinson Crusoe returned to England after the long years of exile, observing and reflecting upon the worlds around him. He sees the cruelty of life in a story of ducks entrapping fellows of their own species. He tells stories of the great plague, one moving one of a father who bring provisions for his wife and family but cannot come to be with them because they are already infected by the plague. Robinson tells of his writing and his slow coming to the task and continuing even in his old age.The solitary Cruesoe is perhaps the figure for Cooetze himself, the writer , seeking to connect with and yet deeply isolated from all of mankind.
... Read more

Product Description
Two-time Booker Prize-winner J. M. Coetzee is one of the world's greatest novelists. This thought-provoking collection gathers twenty-six of his essays on books and writing. In his opening piece, "What Is a Classic?", Coetzee asks, "What does it mean in living terms to say that the classic is what survives?" He explores the answer by way of T. S. Eliot, Johann Sebastian Bach, and Zbigniew Herbert. Coetzee goes on to discuss eighteenth- and nineteenth-century authors such as Defoe and Turgenev, the German modernists such as Rilke, Kafka, and Musil, and the giants of late-twentieth-century literature, among them Brodsky, Gordimer, Rushdie, and Lessing. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (7)

Sparkling Wine, Not Champagne
One has come to expect solid, erudite, balanced essays from J. M. Coetzee, and this is exactly what one finds in this wide-ranging collection. Among recent Nobel prize-winning authors, Coetzee is one of the few who has made the promotion of international literature his vocation. Coetzee is extraordinary in the way that America 's Susan Sontag was in his ability to write sustained introductory essays on such far-flung authors as Rilke, Borges, and Musil. John Updike has this kind of learning, too, but somehow neither Updike nor Coetzee succeeds in writing with passion and excitement. As good as these essays are, they lack the wit and sparkle that one might find in an Amis essay or even in one by Ms Sontag. Coetzee's reach is far, however; who else could write so thoroughly on such disparate authors as South African Daphne Rooke and Czech Josef Skvorecky? Who could write a line by line analysis of recent translations of Kafka? This is an invaluable survey of modern fiction. One only missed a certain playful brilliance.

Essays of the highest order
J. M. Coetzee delves deep into the (hidden) soul of the authors and their work reviewed in these splendid essays. Many novels are (or will become) `classics', in Coetzee's words, `works of art which retain meaning for succeeding ages and which continue to `live''.

Daniel Defoe is an author eclipsed by one of his creations (Robinson Crusoe).
The `Four Quartets' of T.S. Eliot are an attempt to give a historical backing for a radical conservative program for a Europe of nation-states with the Catholic Church as the principal supranational organization.
Samuel Richardson's `Clarissa' is a fight on two fronts. A social one: Clarissa is a member of a powerful family and bringing her down would bring down her family. A gender one: the virtue in women is not proof against the traitorous sexual desire which a skilful seducer can arouse.
Cees Nooteboom is an intelligent traveler, but nevertheless part of the tourism industry.
In `A posthumous confession', Marcellus Emants turns a confession of a worthless life into a work of art.
R.M. Rilke's doctrine excuses all sins except those against Art.
F. M. Dostoevsky conducts a searching interrogation of the `Reason of the Enlightenment'.
The eccentric J. Brodsky elevates prosody to metaphysical status. He despairs of politics and looks to literature for redemption.
For J.L. Borges, the poetic imagination enables the writer to join the universal creative principle. This principle has the nature of Will rather than Reason (Schopenhauer).
A. Oz escapes the intolerance and intransigence which have marred the public face of Israel.
N. Mahfouz's main concern is to link private virtue with civic justice.
D. Lessing explores the mystery of the self and the destiny it elects.
For N. Gordimer, the artist has a special calling. His art tells a truth transcending the truth of history. The goal of art is to transform society and reunite what has been put asunder.
B. Breytenbach's credo is to be against the norm, hegemony, the State and power.

These formidable essays contain also comments on the problems of translation (F. Kafka) and the media (the camera has no ideology: it will lie on behalf of whoever points it and presses the button.
Africa - a continent abused, exploited and patronized by foreigners - is still in the aftershock of colonialism. It is now confronted with hard choices between economic stagnation coupled with a fast rising birth rate or un-African Western science and technology, rationalism, materialism, the profit motive, the cult of the individual and the nuclear family.

These model reviews written by a superb free mind, are a must read for all literature students and lovers of world literature.

best on Kafka and SA
Many topics. As I expected, Coetzee displays a profound knowledge of Kafka. Amazing how much of it can be communicated by discussing problems of translation.
I found the essays on South African literature and history very informative.
Certainly to be recommended to every lover of Coetzee's candid prose.

Superb and challenging
This book is very exceptional. Coetzee's literary criticisms are of the highest level. He discusses a very broad range of writers and books, including;Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe; Samuel Richardson's odd novel Clarissa; Cees Nooteboom's retelling of fairy tales; a critique of William Gass's critique of the poems of Rilke; the difficulty in translating Kafka; the novel The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil, as well as Musil's Diaries published after his death; the most productive years of Dostoevsky; the essays (as well as career and poems) of Joseph Brodsky; a fantastic summary of the career and work of J.L. Borges; another penetrating essay on the serial works of A. S. Byatt; the novels of Caryl Phillips; the career of Salman Rushdie; a review of Nobel Prize winner Naguib Mahfouz's The Harafish; a fascinating essay on Daphne Rooke; an essay on Nadine Gordimer's advice to South African writers to look to the Russian intellectuals prior to the fall of Nicholas and Alexandria for resonance with current South Africa's dilema; and a wonderful essay on Doris Lessings life and work.

Coetzee is brilliant, I have loved his novels, but his literary critism is some of the most thought provoking essays I have read in years. This book is highly recommended.

A Good Resource
This is, overall, an excellent book, and provides exemplary models of both the literary essay and sympathetic criticism. Coetzee also sets the bar at fluency in three languages.

The standout pieces are those focusing on T.S. Eliot, Gass's Rilke, Dostoevsky, and Turgenev. Overall, his treatments of German, South African, and Russian literatures are the strongest, and essays are grouped more or less by subject nationalities. There are also thematic threads running between pieces that give the book a sense of organization by chapter, rather than of separate works grouped together. Coetzee is careful to balance the strengths and weaknesses of each author, referring to collective works to find explanations when they are not readily available in the individual pieces. He is highly sympathetic with the process of writing a novel, and treats most of his subjects in light of this recognition.

Given all this, I was a little baffled when I came to his essay on Brodsky. Though he does acknowledge Brodsky's genius in the final paragraph, the piece as a whole feels like the expulsion of a long-held grudge against the writer. He thoroughly undermines Brodsky's philosophies and politics (whose identical characteristics he supports wholeheartedly when they appear in Borges' and Dostoevsky's works); and does so to the exclusion of an actual discussion of Brodsky's writing.

As a whole, however, this is an excellent collection.For those new to literary criticism, it brings a clear and unique insight to the evaluation of (and creation of) a novel's structure; and for those who are much more well-read in criticism, a clear respect for the author and a unique manipulation of a reader's curiosity and intelligence.I think that's enough caveats for one review:)I definitely recommend this book.
... Read more

Product Description

Customer Reviews (2)

the fewer legal restraints, the better
In these essays, J.M. Coetzee analyzes thoroughly and attacks the role and the (mis)use of censorship in arts.

Taking Offense
State censorship is an inherently bad thing. The cure is worse than the disease.
`A censor pronouncing a ban, whether on an obscene spectacle or a derisive imitation, is like a man trying to stop his pen.s from standing.'

Lady Chatterley's Lover
LCL is a tale about the transgression of boundaries - sexual and sexualized social boundaries.
D.H. Lawrence wanted `the end of taboos, the end of dirty language, the end of dirty books.'

The Harm of Pornography (Catharine MacKinnon)
MacKinnon treats pornography as a political issue, not as a moral one. She sees pornography as an instrument of male power, not pleasure. For her, male desire is one of the avenues through which male dominance realizes itself.
She shows a `striking absence of insight into the desire as experienced by man.'
Her analysis is also parochial, based only on specific US situations.

Censorship and Polemic: Solzhenitsyn
The heroic battle of one man against an enormous censor bureaucracy (more than 70,000 men).

Osip Mandelstam and the Stalin Ode
Stalin and his apparatus castrated a generation of writers, robbing it from its political power and its power of historical witness.

Zbigniew Herbert and the censor
In the face of the paranoia of state censorship, Z. Herbert opted for the `silence' solution.
He chose to work with allegories, thereby defending the autonomy of art (the power of art to validate itself) and proving that poetry can give a vision of an ideal world.

South-African censorship
For the censor, the call for the end of censorship in the name of free speech is part of a plot to destroy the existing order. The censor has the right to take what steps are necessary to protect society.
André Brink's device is Ars Longa: In the end, it is always the artist who wins, because one way or another truth will come out.
For Breyten Breytenbach, `censorship is an act of shame. It has to do with manipulation, power, and repression. For the writer to consent to being censored equals self-castration.

Erasmus: Madness and Rivalry
Erasmus disguised himself into a fool in order to be able to criticize the Catholic Church (The Praise of Folly). Coetzee's portrait shows us Erasmus as an independent and impartial individual, but therefore insulted from all sides: `I would rather die than join a faction'.
Coetzee's analysis is based on postmodernist theories. He shows us Lacan as a vitalist, an adept of Bergson's `acte gratuit' (`it is not at all necessary that the poet knows what he is doing; in fact, it is preferable that he doesn't know.') and Foucault as a romantic (`madness as a voice to contest reason').

J.M. Coetzee's book unmasks the real goal of censorship and the methods authors (try to) used to circumvent it. It is the work of a superb free mind.
A must read for all lovers of art, and specifically literature.

Exceptional writing
I'll resist writing a large review for this book, because the reader should be allowed to make up their own mind. I bought this book after reading many of Coetzee's novels, and 'Stranger Shores'. 'Giving Offense', in my opinion, is a much stronger collection of work than 'Stranger Shores', which is also exceptional, simply because the essays relate to each other far better than those included in 'Stranger Shores'. One can read 'Giving Offense' essay after essay and stay within the same frame of mind. His essays about 'Lady Chatterley's Lover', Osip Mendelstam and Solzhenitsyn are my personal favourites. A very impressive book. ... Read more

Product Description
Open Secrets reflects on contemporary humanistic pedagogy by examining the limits of the teachable in this domain. The Goethean motif of the open secret refers not to a revealed mystery but to an utterance that is not understood, the likely fate of any instruction based purely on authority. Revisiting the European Bildungsroman, it studies the pedagogical relationship from the point of view of the tutor or mentor figure rather than with the usual focus on the young hero. The argument is not confined to works of fiction, however, but examines texts in which the category of fiction has a crucial and constitutive function, for a growing awareness of limited authority on the part of the mentor figures is closely related to fictive self-consciousness in the texts. Rousseau's Emile, as a semi-novelised treatise, whose fictiveness is at once overt and yet unmarked, is relatively unaware of the imaginary nature of its envisaged authority. Passing through Laurence Sterne, C. M. Wieland, Goethe and Nietzsche, the situation is gradually reversed, culminating with the conscious impasse of authority in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. All these writers have achieved their pedagogical impact despite, indeed by means of, their internal scepticism. By contrast, in the three subsequent writers, D. H. Lawrence, F. R. Leavis and J. M. Coetzee, the impasse of pedagogical authority becomes more literal as the authority of Bildung is eroded in the wider culture. The awareness of pedagogical authority as a species of fiction, to be conducted in an aesthetic spirit, remains a significant prophylactic against the perennial pressure of reductive conceptions of the education as form of instructional 'production'. ... Read more

Product Description
Representing a wide range of critical and theoretical perspectives, this volume examines J.M. Coetzee's novels from "Dusklands" to "Diary of a Bad Year". The choice of essays reflects three broad goals: aligning the South African dimension of Coetzee's writing with his 'late modernist' aesthetic; exploring the relationship between Coetzee's novels and his essays on linguistics; and, paying particular attention to his more recent fictional experiments. These objectives are realized in essays focusing on, among other matters, the function of names and etymology in Coetzee's fiction, the vexed relationship between art and politics in apartheid South Africa, the importance of film in Coetzee's literary sensibility, Coetzee's reworkings of Defoe, the paradoxes inherent in confessional narratives, ethics and the controversial politics of reading Disgrace, intertextuality and the fictional self-consciousness of Slow Man. Through its pronounced emphasis on the novelist's later work, the collection points towards a narrato-political and linguistic reassessment of the Coetzee canon. ... Read more

Product Description
J. M. Coetzee's work addresses some of the key critical issues of our time: the relationship between postmodernism and postcolonialism, the role of history in the novel, and, repeatedly, how the author can combine a political consciousness with a commitment to the novel as a work of fiction. In this study, which may be used both as an introduction and by those already familiar with Coetzee's work, Dominic Head shows how Coetzee's engagement with the problems facing the postcolonial writer is always enriched by his awareness of a wider literary tradition. ... Read more

Product Description
'Anti-illusionism is, I suspect, only a marking of time, a phase of recuperation, in the history of the novel. The question is, what next?' (J.M. Coetzee)

This book argues that the significance of Coetzee's fiction lies in the acuity with which it both explores and develops the tradition of the novel - ranging from Cervantes, Defoe and Richardson, to Dostoevsky, Kafka and Beckett - as part of a sustained attempt to rethink the relationship between writing and politics. For Coetzee questions about the future of the novel are closely related to what it means to write after Beckett, and J.M. Coetzee and the Novel pays special attention to the ways in which his fiction discerningly assimilates different aspects of literary modernism to address the questions most fundamental to the experience of late twentieth-century politics.

While Coetzee is rightly known as an intensely serious writer, Patrick Hayes shows that the true seriousness of his writing is intimately bound up with comedy - or, to use the word Coetzee borrows from Joyce, the 'jocoserious'. Opening up a range of new approaches to this major contemporary author, J.M. Coetzee and the Novel argues that it is only by paying especially close attention to the experience of reading Coetzee's complex and finely-nuanced fiction that its distinctive and important impact on longstanding questions about identity, community, and the nature of political modernity can be appreciated. ... Read more

Product Description
The book investigates the problem of how narrative, normally conceived of temporally, encodes its relation to space, especially the territorial space that is the subject of colonial possession and dispossession. The book approaches this problem by, first, providing a theoretical framework derived from the work of Martin Heidegger and Emmanuel Levinas on the ethical and political implications of human dwelling, and, second, by using this framework to examine cultural forms in two historical periods, colonial America and postcolonial South Africa--the primary interest being the works of Charles Brockden Brown and J. M. Coetzee. This book is unique in its elaboration of a spatialDLor more exactly, territorial--conception of narrative form. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

"Desgracia" is not a disgrace to read. On the contrary.
"Disgrace" is one of the best novels I have read so far, not only because of the psychological portrait of its characters, but also because the style of the book makes reading it a deep pleasure. ... Read more

Product Description
David Attwell defends the literary and political integrity of South African novelist J.M. Coetzee by arguing that Coetzee has absorbed the textual turn of postmodern culture while still addressing the ethical tensions of the South African crisis. As a form of "situational metafiction," Coetzee's writing reconstructs and critiques some of the key discourses in the history of colonialism and apartheid from the eighteenth century to the present. While self-conscious about fiction-making, it takes seriously the condition of the society in which it is produced.
Attwell begins by describing the intellectual and political contexts surrounding Coetzee's fiction and then provides a developmental analysis of his six novels, drawing on Coetzee's other writings in stylistics, literary criticism, translation, political journalism and popular culture. Elegantly written, Attwell's analysis deals with both Coetzee's subversion of the dominant culture around him and his ability to see the complexities of giving voice to the anguish of South Africa. ... Read more