J M Coetzee And The Novel

'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) Patrick Hayes argues that the significance of Coetzees fiction lies in the acuity with which it both explores and develops the tradition of the novelranging from Cervantes, Defoe, and Richardson to Dostoevsky, Kafka, and Beckettas 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 examines the ways in which his fiction discerningly assimilates the techniques of literary modernism to engage with some of the most troubling aspects of late twentieth-century cultural and political life. While Coetzee is rightly known as an intensely serious writer, Hayes shows that the true seriousness of his writing is intimately bound up with comedyor, 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 Coetzees finely-nuanced prose that his distinctive impact on longstanding questions about identity, community, and the nature of political modernity can be appreciated.

This book argues that the significance of Coetzee's complex and finely-nuanced 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.

'A great novel by one of the finest authors writing in the English language today' The Times **A BBC BETWEEN THE COVERS BIG JUBILEE READ PICK** After years teaching Romantic poetry at the Technical University of Cape Town, David Lurie, middle-aged and twice divorced, has an impulsive affair with a student. The affair sours; he is denounced and summoned before a committee of inquiry. Willing to admit his guilt, but refusing to yield to pressure to repent publicly, he resigns and retreats to his daughter Lucy's isolated smallholding. For a time, his daughter's influence and the natural rhythms of the farm promise to harmonise his discordant life. But the balance of power in the country is shifting. He and Lucy become victims of a savage and disturbing attack which brings into relief all the faultlines in their relationship. **One of the BBC's 100 Novels That Shaped Our World**

Asserting that Coetzee’s representation of the body as subject to dismemberment counters the colonial representation of the other’s body as exotic and erotically-charged, this study inspects the ambivalence pertaining to Coetzee’s embodied representation of the other and reveals the risks that come with such contrapuntal reiteration. Through the study of the narrative identity of the colonial other and her/his body’s representation, the book also unveils the author’s own authorial identity exposed through the repetitive narrative patterns and characterization choices.

Elizabeth Costello is an Australian writer of international renown. Famous principally for an early novel that established her reputation, she has reached the stage where her remaining function is to be venerated and applauded. Her life has become a series of engagements in sterile conference rooms throughout the world - a private consciousness obliged to reveal itself to a curious public: the presentation of a major award at an American college where she is required to deliver a lecture; a sojourn as the writer in residence on a cruise liner; a visit to her sister, a missionary in Africa, who is receiving an honorary degree, an occasion which both recognise as the final opportunity for effecting some form of reconciliation; and a disquieting appearance at a writers' conference in Amsterdam where she finds the subject of her talk unexpectedly amongst the audience. She has made her life's work the study of other people yet now it is she who is the object of scrutiny. But, for her, what matters is the continuing search for a means of articulating her vision and the verdict of future generations.

With the same electrical intensity of language and insight that he brought to Waiting for the Barbarians, J.M. Coetzee reinvents the story of Robinson Crusoe—and in so doing, directs our attention to the seduction and tyranny of storytelling itself. J.M. Coetzee's latest novel, The Schooldays of Jesus, is now available from Viking. Late Essays: 2006-2016 will be available January 2018. In 1720 the eminent man of letters Daniel Foe is approached by Susan Barton, lately a castaway on a desert island. She wants him to tell her story, and that of the enigmatic man who has become her rescuer, companion, master and sometimes lover: Cruso. Cruso is dead, and his manservant, Friday, is incapable of speech. As she tries to relate the truth about him, the ambitious Barton cannot help turning Cruso into her invention. For as narrated by Foe—as by Coetzee himself—the stories we thought we knew acquire depths that are at once treacherous, elegant, and unexpectedly moving.

In Boyhood, J. M. Coetzee revisits the South Africa of half a century ago, to write about his childhood and interior life. Boyhood's young narrator grew up in a small country town. With a father he imitated but could not respect, and a mother he both adored and resented, he picked his way through a world that refused to explain its rules, but whose rules he knew he must obey. Steering between these contradictions, Boyhood evokes the tensions, delights and terrors of childhood with startling, haunting immediacy. Coetzee examines his young self with the dispassionate curiosity of an explorer rediscovering his own early footprints, and the account of his progress is bright, hard and simply compelling.