J. M. Coetzee: South Africa and the Politics of Writing

Perspectives on Southern Africa

by David Attwell

David Attwell defends the literary and political integrity of South African novelist J.M. Coetzee by arguing that Coetzee has absorbed the textual turn of postmodern culture while still addressing the ethical tensions of the South African crisis. As a form of "situational metafiction," Coetzee's writing reconstructs and critiques some of the key discourses in the history of colonialism and apartheid from the eighteenth century to the present. While self-conscious about fiction-making, it takes seriously the condition of the society in which it is produced.
Attwell begins by describing the intellectual and political contexts surrounding Coetzee's fiction and then provides a developmental analysis of his six novels, drawing on Coetzee's other writings in stylistics, literary criticism, translation, political journalism and popular culture. Elegantly written, Attwell's analysis deals with both Coetzee's subversion of the dominant culture around him and his ability to see the complexities of giving voice to the anguish of South Africa.

160 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1993

About the author

David Attwell is a scholar based at the University of York with longstanding ties to South Africa. He is currently on leave with a Leverhulme Fellowship to write a book on J.M. Coetzee. Alongside Derek Attridge, he co-edited The Cambridge History of South African Literature.

Reviews

[Salvatore · Rating 3 out of 5]

An elegant and insightful reading into the early works of Coetzee's fiction (and sometimes non-fiction), meaning I appreciated his analysis of these novels, an analysis that stuck closely to the text and reimagined the problems that Coetzee's novels create for the reader: the dialogue between text and imagination, the dialogues in the novels themselves, the silence of the other, the projection of story on to the other, the question of what the master narrative is.