Primary textsDusklands. Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1974; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983.
In the Heart of the Country. London: Secker and Warburg, 1977; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982.
Waiting for the Barbarians. London: Secker and Warburg, 1980; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982.
Life and Times of Michael K. London: Secker and Warburg, 1983; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985.
Foe. London: Secker and Warburg, 1986; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987.
White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988.
‘The Novel Today’, Upstream, 6 (1988), 1, pp. 2–5.
Age of Iron. London: Secker and Warburg, 1990; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991.
‘Breyten Breytenbach and the Censor’ (1991), in De-Scribing Empire: Postcolonialism and Textuality, eds. Tiffin, Chris and Lawson, Alan. London: Routledge, 1994, pp. 86–97.
Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews, ed. Attwell, David. Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1992.
‘Thematizing’, in The Return of Thematic Criticism, ed. Sollors, Werner. Cambridge MA.: Harvard University Press, 1993, p. 289.
The Master of Petersburg. London: Secker and Warburg, 1994.
‘Meat Country’, in Granta, 52 (Winter 1995), pp. 41–52.
Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.
Boyhood: Scenes From Provincial Life. London: Secker and Warburg, 1997.
The Lives of Animals, ed. Gutman, Amy. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999.
Disgrace. London: Secker and Warburg, 1999.
Stranger Shores: Essays 1986–1999. London: Secker and Warburg, 2001.
Youth. London: Secker and Warburg, 2002.
Slow Man. London: Secker and Warburg, 2005.
Inner Workings: Literary Essays 2000–2005, Introduction by Derek Attridge. London: Harvill Secker, 2007.
Diary of a Bad Year. London: Harvill Secker, 2007.
Secondary textsAshcroft, Bill, ‘Irony, Allegory and Empire: Waiting for the Barbarians and In the Heart of the Country’, in Critical Essays on J. M. Coetzee, ed. Sue Kossew, pp. 100–16. A contribution to the seminal topic of postcolonial allegory – seminal for postcolonial studies generally, and for an evaluation of Coetzee in particular.
Attridge, Derek, ‘Oppressive Silence: J. M. Coetzee's Foe and the Politics of Canonisation’, in Critical Perspectives on J. M. Coetzee, eds. Graham Huggan and Stephen Watson, pp. 168–90. Demonstrates the ambivalence of Coetzee's literary allusiveness, which exposes ‘the ideological basis of canonisation’, while also revealing Coetzee's own stake in ‘the existing canon’, and in transforming it.
Attridge, Derek, The Singularity of Literature. London: Routledge, 2004. Opposing ‘an increasingly instrumental approach to literature’ in university life, Attridge advocates a form of responsive and creative reading which requires that the reader resists the temptation to read a literary work according to a predetermined set of expectations. The companion volume to J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading.
Attridge, Derek, J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading: Literature in the Event. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. A major work on Coetzee, and the most significant book to date. Attridge gathers together various essays in the context of an over-arching argument that illustrates the principles of reading established in The Singularity of Literature.
Attridge, Derek, and McDonald, Peter, eds., ‘J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace’, special issue, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 4 (2002), 3. A journal special issue devoted to Disgrace.
Attwell, David, J. M. Coetzee: South Africa and the Politics of Writing. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. The first book to embrace convincingly the range of self-reflexive textuality in Coetzee's work, while conveying the clear sense of its rootedness in time and place.
Bakhtin, Mikhail, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, trans. Emerson, Caryl. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984. Contains the analysis of Dostoevsky's Demons that has had an influential bearing on Coetzee's developing ideas about confession.
Bhabha, Homi, The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. Proposes the idea of a ‘postcolonial time-lag’ that allows the discourses of modernity to be addressed from a postcolonial perspective. There may be a suggestive way of thinking about Coetzee's position ‘between’ modernism and postmodernism.
Dovey, Teresa, The Novels of J. M. Coetzee: Lacanian Allegories. Craighall: Donker, 1988. The first book on Coetzee. A Lacanian reading, and so the first attempt at a sustained reading through the lens of poststructuralist theory.
During, Simon, ‘Postmodernism or Post-colonialism Today’, Textual Practice, 1 (1987), 1, pp. 32–47; extract printed in The Post-colonial Studies Reader, eds. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin. London: Routledge, 1995, pp. 125–9. Contains a useful distinction that might help locate Coetzee's historical position in the apartheid years. During distinguishes between the ‘post-colonized’, those who identify with the culture overlaid by imperialism, and by the language of the colonizer on the one hand; and the ‘post-colonizers’, those who are embroiled in the culture and language of colonialism, even while they reject imperialism, on the other.
Gaita, Raimond, The Philosopher's Dog. London: Routledge, 2003. Moral philosopher Raimond Gaita's book contains a noteworthy deliberation on the ‘honour’ of the dead dogs in Disgrace.
Gallagher, Susan VanZanten, A Story of South Africa: J. M. Coetzee's Fiction in Context. Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1991. Considers the novels (up to Age of Iron) in relation to South African politics, suggesting particular correspondences with historical events.
Goddard, Kevin, and Read, John, J. M. Coetzee: A Bibliography. Grahamstown: NELM, 1990. A useful bibliographical resource.
Gordimer, Nadine, ‘The Idea of Gardening’, New York Review of Books, 2 January 1984, pp. 3–6. An important review, which helped consolidate an expectation of realist intervention in the South African writer: Gordimer finds Coetzee's allegorical mode unfit for the task in hand.
Head, Dominic, J. M. Coetzee. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Written for the series ‘Cambridge Studies in African and Caribbean Literature’. Covers the first half of Coetzee's career, up to The Master of Petersburg.
Hegel, G. W. F., Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. Miller, A. V.. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977. The source of Hegel's work on the master/slave, or lord/bondsman dialectic that has influenced Coetzee, most notably in In the Heart of the Country.
Huggan, Graham, and Watson, Stephen, eds. Critical Perspectives on J. M. Coetzee. London: Macmillan, 1996. An important collection of essays in which the two opposing views of Coetzee were represented: accounts in which Coetzee fails to live up to the demands of political representation and historical fidelity are balanced by post-structuralist readings which present his work as much richer.
Jameson, Fredric, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. London: Verso, 1991. Seminal work on postmodernism, which includes an account of how, in postmodernist expression, allegory becomes highly self-conscious, a mode that advances a radical investigation of its own grounding. This is the theoretical context in which Coetzee's use of allegory must be considered.
Jolly, Rosemary Jane, Colonization, Violence, and Narration in White South African Writing: André Brink, Breyten Breytenbach, and J. M. Coetzee. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1996. Contains an important treatment of the forms of violence in Dusklands and Waiting for the Barbarians.
Knox-Shaw, Peter, ‘Dusklands: A Metaphysics of Violence’, Commonwealth Novel in English, 2 (1983), 1, pp. 65–81, reprinted in Huggan and Watson, eds., Critical Perspectives on J. M. Coetzee, pp. 107–19. Knox-Shaw finds the treatment of colonial violence in Dusklands to be imprisoning.
Kossew, Sue, ed. Critical Essays on J. M. Coetzee. New York: G. K. Hall, 1998. Reprints significant essays from more obscure scholarly publications. Features several of the prominent Coetzee critics, including Dovey, Attwell, Attridge and Marais.
Kossew, Sue, Pen and Power: A Post-Colonial Reading of J. M. Coetzee and André Brink. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996. Kossew works with a productive series of comparisons between Coetzee and Brink, enriching and complicating the contrast between Coetzee's postmodernism and Brink's social realism.
Macaskill, Brian, ‘Charting J. M. Coetzee's Middle Voice’, in Critical Essays on J. M. Coetzee, ed. Sue Kossew, pp. 66–83. Shows how Coetzee deploys narrative strategies to position himself against the cultural politics that dominated ideas about South African writing in the first part of his career.
Marais, Michael, ‘Languages of Power: A Story of Reading Coetzee's Michael K/Michael K’, English in Africa, 16 (1989), 2, pp. 31–48. A critic who has been consistently sensitive to Coetzee's scrupulous treatment of the other.
Marais, Michael, ‘Little Enough, Less Than Little: Nothing’: Ethics, Engagement, and Change in the Fiction of J. M. Coetzee', Modern Fiction Studies, 46 (2000), 1, pp. 159–82. One example of a series of noteworthy essays by Marais, inspired by Levinas, on Coetzee's ongoing preoccupation with ethics and otherness.
Moses, Michael Valdez, ‘The Mark of Empire: Writing, History, and Torture in Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians’, Kenyon Review, 15 (1993), 1, pp. 115–27. Important essay on Waiting for the Barbarians concerning Coetzee's sources in Kafka and Foucault.
Moses, Michael Valdez ed., ‘The Writings of J. M. Coetzee’, special issue, South Atlantic Quarterly, 93 (1994), 1. In this journal special issue, also published in book form, several of the (now) central points of debate in Coetzee studies are covered: ethics and politics, the pastoral mode, Coetzee's influences, silence and oppression.
Parry, Benita, ‘Speech and Silence in the Fictions of J. M. Coetzee’, in Critical Perspectives on J. M. Coetzee, eds. Graham, Huggan and Stephen, Watson, pp. 37–65. Considers the proposition that Coetzee's novels re-inscribe oppression in the very act of resisting it, because of the tradition from which they cannot extricate themselves.
Penner, Dick, Countries of the Mind: The Fiction of J. M. Coetzee. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1989. The first book-length study published from the USA. It lays emphasis on the wider resonance of the novels, beyond the South African context.
Poyner, Jane, ed., J. M. Coetzee and the Idea of the Public Intellectual. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006. A collection of essays that places emphasis on the role of the intellectual, with a focus on Disgrace, The Lives of Animals, and Elizabeth Costello.
Slemon, Stephen, ‘Post-Colonial Allegory and the Transformation of History’, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 23 (1988), 1, pp. 157–68. An important essay that can be used to help map Coetzee's contribution to postcolonial allegory. In Slemon's account, postcolonial allegory cultivates historical revisionism, since images of received history are alluded to through a process of allegorical correspondence, engaging the reader in a dialectic of discourses.
Spivak, Gayatri, ‘Theory in the Margin: Coetzee's Foe Reading Defoe's Crusoe/Roxana’, in The Consequences of Theory, eds. Arac, Jonathan and Johnson, Barbara. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991, pp. 154–80. An important intervention by a leading poststructuralist, sensitive to Coetzee's political potential.
Symposium on Disgrace, Scrutiny2, 7 (2002), 1. Another journal special issue, devoted to Disgrace.
Tiffin, Helen, ‘Post-Colonial Literatures and Counter-Discourse’, Kunapipi, 9 (1987), 3, pp. 17–34. Tiffin defines that branch of postcolonial culture where ‘decolonization is process, not arrival’. In such writing European and local discourses are made to interact, in a dialectical relationship where European discourses are very much present, even while they are partly subverted or dismantled. This idea of ‘process, not arrival’ has a direct bearing on Coetzee's earlier work.
Viola, André, J. M. Coetzee: Romancier Sud-Africain. Paris: Harmattan, 1999. Monograph published in French.
Watson, Stephen, ‘Colonialism and the Novels of J. M. Coetzee’, Research in African Literatures, 17 (1986), 3, pp. 370–92; reprinted in Critical Perspectives on J. M. Coetzee, eds. Huggan and Watson, pp. 13–36. Considers in detail the complaint that Coetzee's recourse to mythical/archetypal features amounts to an evasion of history. ‘The Writer and the Devil: J. M. Coetzee's The Master of Petersburg’, New Contrast 22 (1994), 4, pp. 47–61. Watson brings out very fully the uncomfortable ambivalence of Coetzee's novel, with regard to the dilemma of the writer.
Watt, Ian, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding. 1957; reprinted, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981. The classic account of the rise of the English novel, to which Coetzee writes back in Foe.
Wood, James. ‘A Frog's Life’, review of Elizabeth Costello, London Review of Books, 23 October 2003, 25:20, pp. 15–16. A valuable review that highlights an instance of Coetzee's appropriation of religious motifs and ideas for his own creative purposes.
Wright, Derek, ‘Black Earth, White Myth: Coetzee's Michael K ’, Modern Fiction Studies, 38 (1992), 2, pp. 435–44. A pioneering work of postcolonial ecocriticism.
Wright, Laura, Writing ‘Out of All the Camps’: J. M. Coetzee's Narratives of Displacement. London: Routledge, 2006. A book that draws together ethical and political arguments. To the extent that Wright recognizes the importance of animals in Coetzee's work, this is an instance of postcolonial ecocriticism.
Yeoh, Gilbert, ‘J. M. Coetzee and Samuel Beckett: Nothingness, Minimalism and Indeterminacy’, ARIEL, 31 (2000), 4, pp. 117–37. Shows how Coetzee uses certain strategies borrowed from Beckett to address his own personal and historical circumstances. Yeoh thus contributes to the critical view that places great weight on Coetzee's modernist precursors.
