Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- List of abbreviations
- Chronology
- 1 The writer's place: Coetzee and postcolonial literature
- 2 Writing violence: Dusklands
- 3 The wrong kind of love: In the Heart of the Country
- 4 An ethical awakening: Waiting for the Barbarians
- 5 Gardening as resistance: Life and Times of Michael K
- 6 The maze of doubting: Foe
- 7 A true confession: Age of Iron
- 8 Producing the demon: The Master of Petersburg
- Notes
- Select bibliography
- Index
Preface
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 March 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- List of abbreviations
- Chronology
- 1 The writer's place: Coetzee and postcolonial literature
- 2 Writing violence: Dusklands
- 3 The wrong kind of love: In the Heart of the Country
- 4 An ethical awakening: Waiting for the Barbarians
- 5 Gardening as resistance: Life and Times of Michael K
- 6 The maze of doubting: Foe
- 7 A true confession: Age of Iron
- 8 Producing the demon: The Master of Petersburg
- Notes
- Select bibliography
- Index
Summary
Following the publication of his first novel in 1974, the white South African novelist J. M. Coetzee has produced, aside from his academic work and his translations, a total of seven slender novels, one every three or four yours. In terms of simple wordage this might seem a relatively modest creative output; yet the modesty is deceptive. Indeed, the importance of J. M. Coetzee to the direction of the late twentieth-century novel can scarcely be overstated. It is signalled by the weighty questions which recur in discussions of his work: how does his writing make us reconsider our definitions of postmodernism and postcolonialism? How shall ‘history’ be imagined in novels? What does it mean for an author to pledge allegiance to the discourse of fiction (rather than the discourse of politics)? Is there a function for a literary canon? What role can literary theory play in these evaluations? And what kind of ethical stance might emerge from such intensely serious and significant investigations?
The attempts to answer these questions alert us to an as-yetundefined site of creativity. This is the crucial issue in understanding Coetzee's interim position in a very particular corner of postcolonial writing: the literature of the ‘post-colonizer’, which here locates a transitional site between Europe and Africa. In his collection of essays, White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa, Coetzee establishes a formulation which is to the point: ‘white writing is white only in so far as it is generated by the concerns of people no longer European, not yet African’ (WW, 11).
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- Chapter
- Information
- J. M. Coetzee , pp. ix - xiiPublisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1998