J.M. Coetzee's Austerities

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 editors adopted three broad goals: aligning the South African Coetzee with the late modernist Coetzee; exploring the relationship between Coetzee's novels and his essays on linguistics; and paying particular attention to Coetzee's most recent fiction. 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 novel Disgrace, the politics of reading in the Disgrace controversy, and the intertextuality and fictional self-consciousness of Slow Man. By placing particular emphasis on Coetzee's recent work, the collection points towards a narrato-political and linguistic reassessment of the novelist's canon.