5 - Genres: Elizabeth Costello, Diary of a Bad Year, Summertime

Summary

Coetzee’s interest in, and ability to exploit, the conventions and expectations of genre is evident throughout his career; this chapter focuses on three examples in which the relation between fiction and non-fiction is put in question, Elizabeth Costello, Diary of a Bad Year, and Summertime. In the case of the first of these works, the chapter examines Coetzee’s conversion of lectures into a fiction, and asks how we are to take the opinions expressed by the eponymous individual. In the case of Diary of a Bad Year, it discusses Coetzee’s framing of diary entries within a fictional narrative, and considers the degree of authorial endorsement of the resulting ‘opinions’ and the effect of the story unfolding at the foot of the page. In Summertime, the generic challenge of a memoir supposedly written after the author’s death is explored, and attention is paid to the work’s status as autobiography and as comic self-interrogation.