J. M. Coetzee: Major Works & Bibliography
 UNDER CONSTRUCTION!
 Cora Agatucci, HUM 211 Course Pack - Fall 2004

Short Cuts on this webpage: Major Works by J. M. Coetzee | Other Works | Bibliography

J. M. Coetzee: Biography - go to: http://web.cocc.edu/cagatucci/classes/hum211/CoursePack/coetzee.htm

Word to the Wise: Don't just print this webpage (it's really long & repetitious right now) without print preview -
then pick and choose what you might want until I have time to edit!  Thanks, Cora

Major Works by J. M. Coetzee
[Partially Complete]

1974: Dusklands. [novel]
          First published: Johannesburg, South Africa: Ravan Press, 1974.
          First published in U.S.A.: New York: Penguin   Books, 1985.
          LC Call No. PR9369.3.C58 D8 . . . one + editions available to COCC students through Summit

Description: Dusklands contains two novellas: The Vietnam Project (set in U.S.A.) and The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee (set in South Africa). "The Vietnam Project introduces Eugene Dawn, employed to help the Americans win the Vietnam War through psychological warfare. The assignment eventually costs Dawn his sanity. The title character of The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee, a fictionalized ancestor of the author, is an explorer and conqueror in the 1760s who destroys an entire South African tribe over his perception that the people have humiliated him through their indifference and lack of fear" (“J(ohn) M(axwell) Coetzee, 1940-"). "Geographically separate and at a temporal remove of two centuries, these two novellas initially appear to be completely independent. The title of the combined text, however, by implication classifies both the United States and South Africa as 'dusklands' and thus suggests that they have something in common--a shared history of colonialism" (Marais, “J. M. Coetzee"). The two novellas "are juxtaposed to offer a scarifying account of the fear and paranoia of imperialists and aggressors and the horrifying ways in which dominant regimes, 'empires,' commit violence against 'the other' through repression, torture, and genocide. While Coetzee's work is firmly grounded in the violence and oppression of the South African situation out of which he writes, he regards it as 'only one manifestation of a wider historical situation to do with colonialism, late colonialism, neo-colonialism'" (Tiffin).

1977: In the Heart of the Country. [novel]
           First published in the U.S.A. as From the Heart of the Country, Harper (New York, NY), 1977; and
           in England as In the Heart of the Country, Secker & Warburg (London, England), 1977.
           LC Call No. PR9369.3 .C58 I5  [date] . . . one + editions available to COCC students through Summit

Description: In the Heart of the Country treats racial conflict and mental deterioration. The protagonist is Magda, a white South African spinster, "who lives with her father and their servants Klein-Anna and Hendrik, on a remote and lonely sheep farm somewhere in South Africa, probably the Karoo. The exact geographical location of this setting is not stipulated, and neither is the historical period in which the action occurs--the first of many indeterminacies in this highly ambivalent novel" (Marais, “J. M. Coetzee"). Magda tells the story in diary form, but her reliability as narrator is suspect, and "the novel defies any coherent reconstruction of its plot. So, for example, it is not clear whether Magda, who is jealous of the sexual relationship that her father may or may not have contrived with Klein-Anna, does or does not murder him. In fact, the text undermines all certainty here by providing the reader with two accounts of the putative murder, yet after each account the father reappears later in the story. What follows the purported murder is equally ambivalent: Magda attempts to regain her position of mastery over Hendrik and Klein-Anna but, upon failing, tries to form an egalitarian relationship with them. Hendrik, however, seemingly rapes her and then, together with Anna, deserts the farm" (Marais, “J. M. Coetzee"). "The novel ends with Magda, now alone on the farm, pleading with "sky-creatures" whom she believes are sending her messages" (Marais, “J. M. Coetzee"). "The 'ghostly brown figures of the last people I knew' eventually abandon her. In this world where historical hatred and conflicts are irreconcilable, she cannot escape the polarities enshrined in the system to become "neither master nor slave, neither parent nor child but the bridge between" (Tiffin).
Awards: CNA (Central News Agency) Literary Award and Mofolo-Plomer Literary prize.
Film Adaptation: "A 1985 Franco-Belgian motion-picture adaptation of the novel, Dust, starred Jane Birkin as Magda and Trevor Howard as her father. Marion Hänsel, who directed and wrote the screenplay, won the Silver Lion for Best First Work at the Venice Film Festival" (Marais, “J. M. Coetzee").

1980: Waiting for the Barbarians. [novel]
First published: London: Secker & Warburg, 1980; First published in U.S.A.: New York: Penguin, 1982.
LC Call No.: PR9369.3.C58 W3 1982 - COCC Library holding - 2nd floor
LC Call No. PR9369.3.C58 W3 . . . one + editions available from Summit

Description: Coetzee's third novel, "[s]et in a frontier settlement of state referred to simply as the Third Empire,"  made it "evident that the politics of colonization would constitute a recurrent theme in his fiction" (Marais, “J. M. Coetzee"). "Though the setting of Waiting for the Barbarians is unspecified, the novel can, like the earlier works, be read as a political fable of South Africa. A sympathetic but ineffectual liberal humanist, the narrator [and protagonist known only as the] magistrate governs a frontier settlement at the edges of empire. A well-meaning man, he is nevertheless implicated in 'the system' and is no match for the neo-fascist torturer, Colonel Joll, who persecutes the few pathetic 'barbarians' (actually from a local fishing tribe) the Empire has succeeded in capturing. The barbarians are almost invisible, being largely a product of that nameless fear that haunts all conquering empires. The Empire is threatened from within, not from without, but it projects its paranoia onto the unknown 'other'" (Tiffin). "In the novel, a magistrate attempting to protect the peaceful nomadic people of his district is imprisoned and tortured by the army that arrives at the frontier town to destroy the "barbarians" on behalf of the Empire. The horror of what he has seen and experienced affects the magistrate in inalterable ways, bringing changes in his personality that he cannot understand" (“J(ohn) M(axwell) Coetzee, 1940-"). "The barbarians remain unknown, and neither Joll's brutalities nor the magistrate's feeble attempts at love and restitution can bring them closer" (Tiffin). According to Anthony Burgess, in Waiting for the Barbarians, Coetzee "'with laconic brilliance, articulates one of the basic problems of our time--how to understand . . . [the] mentality behind the brutality and injustice' . . . " (qtd. in “J(ohn) M(axwell) Coetzee, 1940-").
Awards: CNA Literary Award, James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and Geoffrey Faber Award
1983:  Life and Times of Michael K. [novel]
 First published: London: Secker & Warburg, 1983; first published in U.S.A.: New York: Viking, 1984.
LC Call No. PR9369.3.C58 L5 . . . one or more editions available from Summit

Description: While Coetzee's earlier novels are narrated by "those who are implicated in the imperial purpose, most of Life and Times of Michael K is told from the perspective of those it controls. Michael K attempts, in this highly political novel, to live outside politics and history. As is clear in Coetzee's earlier work, the 'real heroes' are those who attempt to escape history, not those who connive in its making. Formerly a gardener in Cape Town, Michael K attempts to return his dying mother by makeshift cart to the farm of her childhood. She dies during the journey, but her son continues to the destination with her ashes. Here he is insulated from the civil and military terror that are both cause and effect of the breakdown of social order. In complete isolation he is able to discover the joys of cultivation. Though his desert produce barely allows him to subsist it offers a thoroughly magnificent apprehension of life and living. Predictably his painful desert idyll is terminated when he is captured and incarcerated as a guerrilla, but his sense of that one 'tip of vivid green,' the potential of life outside a corrupt society and even outside the casual and violent compassion of other fringe dwellers remains with him to the end" (Tiffin). Awards: CNA Literary Award, Booker-McConnell Prize, and Prix Femina Etranger
1987: Jerusalem Prize for the Freedom of the Individual in Society for Life & Times of Michael K.
In his acceptance speech, Coetzee "remarked on the manner in which the South African state's structures of power have created 'deformed and stunted relations between human beings' and on the extent to which literary representations of life in this country 'no matter how intense . . . suffer from the same stuntedness and deformity.' He then commented that South African literature 'is a literature of bondage. . . . a less than fully human literature'" (Marais, “J. M. Coetzee").

1986: A Land Apart: A South African Reader. Ed. André Brink and J. M. Coetzee.
         Boston: Faber and Faber, 1986. New York: Viking, 1987.
         One + editions available to COCC students from Summit
1987: Foe. [novel]
         New York: Viking, 1987. New York: Penguin, 1987.
             LC Call no.: PR9369.3.C58 F6 1987b - COCC Library holding, 2nd floor
            LC Call no. PR9369.3.C58 F6 [date]. . . one +  editions available from Summit

Description: "In his next novel, Foe (1986), Coetzee departed altogether from the South African geopolitical context. The first section of the novel is set on a deserted island and constitutes a retelling of Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719) by Susan Barton, the castaway narrator of Foe" (Marais, “J. M. Coetzee"). "Susan Barton is shipwrecked on an island inhabited by 'Cruso' and Friday, who labor at constructing barren terraces. Friday is mute, having had his tongue cut out, possibly by slavers, possibly by Cruso himself" (Tiffin). The first section "deals with her stay on the island and focuses primarily on the relationship of Cruso (Coetzee's spelling) with Friday" (Marais, “J. M. Coetzee"). "They are 'rescued' from the island but Cruso dies on the voyage to England. On their arrival in London, Susan and Friday become 'characters in search of an author,' thus beginning their association with the elusive "Foe" and the novel's continuing complex exploration of authorship, writing, and betrayal, themes Coetzee takes up again in The Master of Petersburg" (Tiffin). "In the second section the island is replaced by Defoe's house in England and the focus falls on Susan Barton's relationship with Friday" (Marais, “J. M. Coetzee"). Foe "is also an inquiry into white liberal humanism and into the problem of white representations of the black majority; of the difficulty for South African blacks of finding 'a voice,' a way of speaking within the political and textual constraints that render them, like Friday, mute" (Tiffin). "Given his fascination with the colonization process, it is not surprising that so many of Coetzee's novels reenact the Robinson Crusoe paradigm with its classic encounter between colonizer and colonized and the dialectic of self and other that informs this relationship. After all, Robinson Crusoe, as a literary reflection of the expansive imperialist thrust of Europeans that started in the seventeenth century, has over the centuries gained the status of a folktale of white empire. One could even go as far as to say that this fable forms a paradigm of the conventional Western mode of thinking about the cultural other. This reason seems to be behind Coetzee's decision to rework Defoe's novel [Robinson Crusoe], for which he wrote the introduction to the 1999 Oxford World's Classics edition" (Marais, “J. M. Coetzee"). In a 1987 interview with Tony Morphet "on whether Foe could be seen as 'a retreat from the South African situation," Coetzee responded: "'"Foe is a retreat from the South African situation in a narrow temporal perspective. It is not a retreat from the subject of colonialism or from questions of power'" (qtd. in Marais, “J. M. Coetzee").

Of related interest: Coetzee, J. M. "He and His Man." "J. M. Coetzee - Nobel Lecture." [English language version.] 7 Dec. 2003. Nobel e-Museum. Nobel Foundation, 2004. 4 Sep. 2004 <http://www.nobel.se/literature/laureates/2003/coetzee-lecture-e.html>.

1988: White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa. [nonfiction; literary criticism]
New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1988.
LC Call No.: PR 9358.2.W45 C64 1988 - COCC Library holding - 2nd floor
LC Call No. PR 9358.2.W45 C64  . . . one or more editions available from Summit

Description: White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa is a collection of Coetzee's "critical reflections on the mixed fortunes of 'white writing' in South Africa, 'a body of writing [not] different in nature from black writing,' but 'generated by the concerns of people no longer European, yet not African,' Shaun Irlam observed in MLN. The seven essays included in the book discuss writings from the late seventeenth century to the present, through which Coetzee examines the foundations of modern South African writers' attitudes. Irlam described the strength of White Writing as its ability 'to interrogate succinctly and lucidly the presuppositions inhabiting the language with which "white writers" have addressed and presumed to ventriloquize Africa" (qtd. in “J(ohn) M(axwell) Coetzee, 1940-”).
1990: Age of Iron. [novel]
           New York: Random House, 1990
               LC Call No. PR9369.3.C58 A7 [date] . . .  - one or more editions available from Summit

Description: "Age of Iron differs from its predecessors in that it deals quite explicitly with contemporary political realities in South Africa. The setting is specified as Cape Town, and, although the date is not provided, various details situate the novel temporally in the winter of 1986, a period in South African history that, as the title of the novel suggests, was characterized by unmitigated violence, bloodshed, and political intransigence. It was a time of death not only for the country as a whole but also for Coetzee personally, who, during the writing of the novel, lost four relatives--his former wife (the couple had divorced in 1980), both parents, and his son, Nicholas. Not surprisingly, then, the novel is, as Malvern van Wyk Smith claims, 'a meditation on death, on many levels'" (Marais, “J. M. Coetzee"). "The white liberal protagonist, Mrs Curren, is dying of cancer, a disease as much of the apartheid South African State as of herself. The role of representation in the creation and perpetuation of such regimes is again a major issue, but this time it is the South African media (rather than the ur-text of imperialism) that is the violent instrument of "disinformation." The television's presentation of South Africa as "a land of smiling [white] neighbours" contrasts violently with the world of Mrs Curren's black "housegirl," Florence, and with the life (and death) Mrs Curren is forced to witness in Guguletu township. Mrs Curren admits to herself (and to her daughter in the United States to whom the letters that compose the novel are addressed) her complicity in the maintenance of this regime. But through her "witness" in the township and her increasingly close relationship with the vagrant Vercueil, she attempts to fight free of the constraints of her whiteness, eventually embracing her own death as the only apparent solution. Apartheid South Africa has, tragically, produced "children of iron" both white and black, and relationships between children and parents are of major concern" (Tiffin). "As her disease and the chaos of her homeland progress, Mrs. Curren feels the effects her society has had on its black members; her realization that "now my eyes are open and I can never close them again" forms the basis for her growing rage against the system. After her housekeeper's son and his friend are murdered in her home, Mrs. Curren runs away and hides beneath an overpass, leaving her vulnerable to attack by a gang. She is rescued by Vercueil, a street person she has gradually allowed into her house and her life, who returns her to her home and tends to her needs as the cancer continues its destruction. The book takes the form of a letter from Mrs. Curren to her daughter, living in the United States because she cannot tolerate apartheid.. . . As her life ends, Mrs. Curren's urgency to correct the wrongs she never before questioned intensifies. 'In this chronicle of an aged white woman coming to understand, and of the unavoidable claims of her country's black youth, Mr. Coetzee has created a superbly realized novel whose truths cut to the bone,' Lawrence Thornton wrote in the New York Times Book Review" (qtd. in “J(ohn) M(axwell) Coetzee, 1940-” ).
Award: Sunday Express Book of the Year Prize, 1990
1992: Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews. [Literary Criticism & Interviews]
         Ed. David Attwell. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1992.
         LC Call No.  PR9369.3.C58 Z464 1992 - one or more editions available from Summit

Description: "In Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews, a collection of critical essays on Samuel Beckett, Franz Kafka, D. H. Lawrence, Nadine Gordimer, and others, Coetzee presents a 'literary autobiography,' according to Ann Irvine in a Library Journal review. Discussions of issues including censorship and popular culture and interviews with the author preceding each section round out the collection" (qtd. in “J(ohn) M(axwell) Coetzee, 1940-” ). Reprinted in Doubling the Point is a 1986 article "Into the Dark Chamber: The Novelist and South Africa," in which "Coetzee articulated the South African novelist's desire for the freedom that true change would bring: 'When the choice is no longer limited to either looking on in horrified fascination as the blow falls or turning one's eyes away, then the novel can once again take as its province the whole of life, and even the torture chamber can be accorded a place in the design.' Elsewhere, he has argued that such freedom is a precondition for the writing of novels that are truly great. As these statements indicate, the future direction of Coetzee's work, as with South African literature as a whole, will depend entirely on the nature and the extent of the change that South African society undergoes" (Marais, “J. M. Coetzee").

Available online: Coetzee, J. M. "Into the Dark Chamber: The Novelist and South Africa." New York Times 12 Jan. 1986, Late City Final ed., sec. 7: 13. New York Times on the Web, 1998. 31 Aug. 2004 <http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/11/02/home/coetzee-chamber.html>.

Works Cited (in Major Works section above, so far!)

“J(ohn) M(axwell) Coetzee, 1940- .” 2 Oct. 2003.  Contemporary Authors Online.  Gale, 2003.  Gale Literature Resource Center [Online Subscription Database]. The Gale Group, 2004. Central Oregon Community College Library, Bend, OR. 17 August 2004.

Marais, Michael.  “J. M. Coetzee, February 9, 1940- .”  Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 225: South African Writers.  Ed. Paul A. Scanlon.  Detroit: Gale Group, 2000. 131-149. Gale Literature Resource Center [Online Subscription Database]. The Gale Group, 2004. Central Oregon Community College Library, Bend, OR. 17 August 2004. 

Tiffin, H. M. "J. M. Coetzee: Overview." Contemporary Novelists. 6th ed. Ed. Susan Windisch Brown. St. James Press, 1996. Rpt. Gale Literature Resource Center [Online Subscription Database]. The Gale Group, 2004. Central Oregon Community College Library, Bend, OR. 17 August 2004. 

Full text available to COCC students from Gale Literature Resource Center online subscription database.

The rest of Coetzee's Major Works section is under construction!!
(though you can find draft material below)
1994: The Master of Petersburg. [novel]
         First Published: London: Secker & Warburg, 1994; New York: Viking, 1994.
               LC Call No.  PR9369.3.C58 M3 . . .  - one or more editions available from Summit

Description: under construction!!

Awards: Premio Modello, 1994, and Irish Times International Fiction Prize, 1995

1996: Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship. [essays]
Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1996.
LC Call No. Z657 .C658 1996 - one or more editions available from Summit

Description: "Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship was Coetzee's first collection of essays in nearly ten years, since White Writing appeared. The essays collected in Giving Offense were written over a period of about six years. Here Coetzee--a writer quite familiar with the varying forms of censorship and the writer's response to them--attempts to complicate what he calls 'the two tired images of the writer under censorship: the moral giant under attack from hordes of moral pygmies and the helpless innocent persecuted by a mighty state apparatus.' Coetzee discusses three tyrannical regimes: Nazism, Communism, and apartheid; and, drawing upon his training as an academic scholar as well as his experiences as a fiction writer, argues that the censor and the writer have often been 'brother-enemies, mirror images one of the other" in their struggle to claim the truth of their position'" (qtd. in “J(ohn) M(axwell) Coetzee, 1940-” ).
1997: Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life [I]. [memoir-autobiography].
           New York: Penguin, 1998.
               LC Call No. PR9369.3.C58 Z463 1998 - one or more editions available from Summit

Description:  From “J(ohn) M(axwell) Coetzee, 1940-”:
In Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life, Coetzee experiments with autobiography, a surprising turn for a writer, as Caryl Phillips noted in the New Republic, "whose literary output has successfully resisted an autobiographical reading." Boyhood, written in the third person, "reads more like a novella than a true autobiography. Coetzee develops his character, a young boy on the verge of adolescence, through a richly detailed interior monolog," wrote Denise S. Sticha in Library Journal. He recounts his life growing up in Worcester, South Africa, where he moved with his family from Cape Town after his father's latest business failure. There, he observes the contradictions of apartheid and the subtle distinctions of class and ethnicity with a precociously writerly eye. Rand Richards Cooper, writing for the New York Times Book Review, stated that "Coetzee's themes lie where the political, the spiritual, the psychological and the physical converge: the nightmare of bureaucratic violence; or forlorn estrangement from the land; a Shakespearean anxiety about nature put out of its order; and the insistent neediness of the body." Coetzee, an Afrikaaner whose parents chose to speak English, finds himself between worlds, neither properly Afrikaaner nor English. Throughout his boyhood, he encounters the stupid brutalities inflicted by arbitrary divisions between white and black, Native and Coloured, Afrikaaner and English. Phillips speculated that "as a boy Coetzee feels compelled to learn how to negotiate the falsehoods that white South Africa offers up to those who wish to belong. In short, he develops the mentality of the writer. He fills his world with doubt, he rejects authority in all its forms--political, social, personal--and he cultivates the ability to resign himself to the overwhelming insecurity of the heart" (qtd. in “J(ohn) M(axwell) Coetzee, 1940-” ).
1999: The Lives of Animals. ["lecture-fable" by J. M. Coetzee + essays by other authors.]
         Ed. Amy Gutmann. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1999.
               LC Call No. HV4708 .L57 [date]...one or more editions available to COCC students from Summit

Summit Catalog Description: "J. M. Coetzee uses fiction to present a discussion of animal rights in all their complexity. He draws us into his character's own sense of mortality, her compassion for animals, and her alienation from humans, even from her own family. In his fable, presented as a Tanner Lecture sponsored by the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University, Coetzee immerses us in a drama reflecting the real-life situation at hand: a writer delivering a lecture on an emotionally charged issue at a prestigious university. The story is followed by responses treating the reader to a variety of perspectives, delivered by leading thinkers in different fields. Coetzee's text is accompanied by an introduction by political philosopher Amy Gutmann and responsive essays by religion scholar Wendy Doniger, primatologist Barbara Smuts, literary theorist Marjorie Garber, and moral philosopher Peter Singer, author of 'Animal Liberation.' Together the lecture-fable and the essays explore the palpable social consequences of uncompromising moral conflict and confrontation."

Description:  From “J(ohn) M(axwell) Coetzee, 1940-”:
"The Lives of Animals is a unique effort by Coetzee, incorporating his own lectures on animal rights with the fictional story of Elizabeth Costello, a novelist obsessed by the horrors of human cruelty to animals. In this "wonderfully inventive and inconclusive book," as Stephen H. Webb described it in Christian Century, Coetzee poses questions about the morality of vegetarianism and the guilt of those who use animal products. But his arguments are not simplistic: he wonders, for example, if vegetarians are really trying to save animals, or only trying to put themselves in a morally superior position to other humans. The character of Elizabeth Costello is revealed as deeply flawed, and the author's ambiguity about her "forces us to think," added Webb. Are her lectures "academic hyperbole and prophetic provocation? Are we meant to feel sorry for her or, angered by her poor reception, to stand up and defend her and her cause?" Following the novella, there are responses to Costello's arguments from four real-life scholars who have written about animals: Barbara Smuts, Peter Singer, Marjorie Garber, and Wendy Doniger. The sum of the book, wrote Marlene Chamberlain in Booklist, is valuable "for Coetzee fans and others interested in the links between philosophy, reason, and the rights of nonhumans."

1999: Disgrace. [novel]
        New York: Viking, 1999.
         LC Call No. PR9369.3.C58 D5 [date] . . . - one or more editions available from Summit

Description: Under construction
- see also Disgrace Reading Guide [HUM 211 Course Pack - Fall 2004] - Link!!

Awards: Booker Prize, 1999, National Book League and Commonwealth Writer's Prize: Best Novel

The Man Booker Prize 2004 [official web site].
 http://www.manbookerprize.co.uk/

The Man Booker International Prize 2005 [official web site]
 http://www.manbookerinternational.com/intro.html

The Man Booker International Prize is unique in the world of literature in that it can be won by an author of any nationality, providing that his or her work is available in the English language. It will be awarded every second year. An author can only win the award once.

The Booker Prize for Fiction was originally set up by Booker plc in 1969 to reward merit, raise the stature of the author in the eyes of the public and encourage an interest in contemporary quality fiction. In April 2002, it was announced that the Man Group had been chosen by the Booker Prize Foundation as the new sponsor of the Booker Prize. The sponsorship will run until 2006 during which time the prize will be known as the Man Booker Prize.

"Excerpts from Disgrace." [Pages 111-112 and 183-184.] "J. M. Coetzee - Prose."
6 Nov. 2003. Nobel e-Museum. Nobel Foundation, 2004. 4 Sep. 2004 <http://www.nobel.se/literature/laureates/2003/coetzee-prose.html>.

Special issue of Interventions: The International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 4.3 (Nov. 2002) devoted to Disgrace, by J. M. Coetzee. [see Bibliography below]

2001: Stranger Shores: Literary Essays, 1986-1999. [essays, literary criticism]
2001. New York: Penguin, 2002.
LC Call No. PR9369.3.C58 S77 [date] . . . - one or more editions available from Summit

Description:  From “J(ohn) M(axwell) Coetzee, 1940-”:
Insight into the workings of Coetzee's mind is afforded through Stranger Shores: Literary Essays, 1986-1999, which collects twenty-six essays of literary criticism by the author, focusing on authors such as Franz Kafka, Salman Rushdie, Nadine Gordimer, and Jorge Luis Borges. "These are not puff pieces," warned James Shapiro in New York Times Book Review. In his criticism, "Coetzee wields a sharp scalpel, carefully exposing the stylistic flaws, theoretical shortcuts and, on occasion, bad faith of writers he otherwise admires." An Economist contributor found the tone of the book "dry tending to arid," and Alberto Manguel in Spectator suggested that the collection lacked a needed "touch of passion." Yet Shapiro thought that Stranger Shores is a fine model of "blunt, elegant and unflinching criticism at a time when novelists tend to go rather easy when reviewing their colleagues." Finally, Shapiro concluded, Stranger Shores is valuable for the "light it casts on a stage in the intellectual journey of one of the most cerebral and consequential writers of our day."

2002: Youth: Scenes from Provincial Life II. [memoir-autobiography].
New York: Penguin, 2002.
LC Call no: PR9369.3.C58 Y68 2002  - one or more editions available from Summit

Description:  Under Construction!

Coetzee, J. M. "Lost in London," Excerpt from Youth: Scenes from Provincial Life II (memoir):
 http://books.guardian.co.uk/extracts/story/0,6761,1059934,00.html

Coetzee, J. M. "Fever and Flame." [Excerpt from Youth.] American Scholar 71.3 (Summer 2002): 17 (9pp.) Academic Search Premier (7254252). EBSCOhost. Central Oregon Community College Library, Bend, OR. 6 Sep. 2004.

EBSCO Academic Search Premier subscription database articles are available online to COCC students.

2003: Elizabeth Costello. [novel]
New York: Viking, 2003.
LC Call No. PR9369.3.C58 E44 2003 - one or more editions available from Summit

Coetzee, J. M. "'That Is Not Where I Come From,'" Excerpt from Elizabeth Costello (novel):
http://books.guardian.co.uk/extracts/story/0,6761,1055012,00.html

Coetzee, J. M. "The Reluctant Guest of Honour," Excerpt from Elizabeth Costello (novel):
http://books.guardian.co.uk/extracts/story/0,6761,1027772,00.html

Banville, John. "Being and Nothingness." Rev. of Elizabeth Costello, by J. M. Coetzee. Nation 3 Nov. 2003: 30-33 (4pp). Academic Search Premier (11125301). EBSCOhost. Central Oregon Community College Library, Bend, OR. 6 Sep. 2004.

Lee, Hermione. "The Rest Is Silence." Rev. of Elizabeth Costello, by J. M. Coetzee. Guardian [Manchester, UK] 30 Aug. 2003. Guardian Unlimited Books, Guardian Newspapers, 2004. 31 Aug. 2004 <http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/generalfiction/0,6121,1031735,00.html>.

Szalai, Jennifer. "Harvest of a Quiet Eye: J. M. Coetzee and the Art of Lucidity." Harper's Magazine July 2004: 85-89.

West, Paul. "The Novelist and the Hangman: When Horror Invades Protocol." Harper's Magazine July 2004: 89+.

Description:  Under Construction!

Other Works by J. M. Coetzee

Coetzee, J. M. The Novel in Africa. Berkeley, CA: Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities, 1999.

Call No.: PR9369.3.C58 N6 1999 - available to COCC students from Summit

The Novel in Africa, is the text of November 1998's Una's Lecture, delivered by South African novelist J.M. Coetzee. "The lecture, embedded in a fiction, produces both irritation and surprise." Read the abstract or download the publication. 28 p. in Adobe pdf. (Townsend Center, Occasional Papers 17). http://ls.berkeley.edu/dept/townsend/pubs/publications_top.html

Coetzee, J. M. "Awakening." Rev. of Jump and The Pickup, by Nadine Gordimer. New York Review of Books [50.16] 23 October 2003. NYREV 2004. 31 Aug. 2004 <http://www.nybooks.com/articles/16670>.

Coetzee, J. M. "He and His Man." "J. M. Coetzee - Nobel Lecture." [English language version.] 7 Dec. 2003. Nobel e-Museum. Nobel Foundation, 2004. 4 Sep. 2004 <http://www.nobel.se/literature/laureates/2003/coetzee-lecture-e.html>.

Coetzee, J. M. "Into the Dark Chamber: The Novelist and South Africa." New York Times 12 Jan. 1986, Late City Final ed., sec. 7: 13. New York Times on the Web, 1998. 31 Aug. 2004 <http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/11/02/home/coetzee-chamber.html>.

Coetzee, J. M. "J. M. Coetzee - Biography." Nobel e-Museum. Nobel Foundation, Swedish Academy. 2004.  30 August 2004 <http://www.nobel.se/literature/laureates/2003/coetzee-bio.html>.

"J. M. Coetzee: Banquet Speech." 10 Dec. 2003. Nobel e-Museum. Nobel Foundation, 2003. 4 Sep. 2004 <http://www.nobel.se/literature/laureates/2003/coetzee-speech-e.html>.

  • (With Graham Swift, John Lanchester, and Ian Jack) Food: The Vital Stuff, Penguin (New York, NY), 1995.
  • (With Bill Reichblum) What Is Realism?, Bennington College (Bennington, VT), 1997.
  • (With Dan Cameron and Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev) William Kentridge, Phaidon (London, England), 1999.
  • The Humanities in Africa/Die Geisteswissenschaften in Afrika, Carl Friedrich von Siemens Stiftung (Munich, Germany), 2001.

 

Translations by J. M. Coetzee (look these up & supply complete biblio info!

  • (Translator) Marcellus Emants, A Posthumous Confession, Twayne (Boston, MA), 1976.
  • (Translator) Wilma Stockenstroem, The Expedition to the Baobab Tree, Faber (London, England), 1983.
  • (Translator and author of introduction) Landscape With Rowers: Poetry from the Netherlands, Princeton University Press, in press.

 

Works Cited (in Major Works section - see above, so far!)

“J(ohn) M(axwell) Coetzee, 1940- .” 2 Oct. 2003.  Contemporary Authors Online.  Gale, 2003.  Gale Literature Resource Center [Online Subscription Database]. The Gale Group, 2004. Central Oregon Community College Library, Bend, OR. 17 August 2004.

Marais, Michael.  “J. M. Coetzee, February 9, 1940- .”  Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 225: South African Writers.  Ed. Paul A. Scanlon.  Detroit: Gale Group, 2000. 131-149. Gale Literature Resource Center [Online Subscription Database]. The Gale Group, 2004. Central Oregon Community College Library, Bend, OR. 17 August 2004. 

Tiffin, H. M. "J. M. Coetzee: Overview." Contemporary Novelists. 6th ed. Ed. Susan Windisch Brown. St. James Press, 1996. Rpt. Gale Literature Resource Center [Online Subscription Database]. The Gale Group, 2004. Central Oregon Community College Library, Bend, OR. 17 August 2004. 

Full text available to COCC students from Gale Literature Resource Center online subscription database.

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Bibliography

Attridge, Derek. J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading: Literature in the Event. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2004.

LC Call No. PR9369.3.C58 Z53 2004 -  available to COCC students from Summit

Attridge, Derek. "J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace: Introduction." Editorial. [Special Issue devoted to Disgrace, by J. M. Coetzee.]  Interventions: The International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 4.3 (Nov. 2002): 315-320.

Full text in .pdf format available to COCC students from EBSCO Academic Search Premier online subscription database

Attridge, Derek. "Literary Form and the Demands of Politics: Otherness in J. M. Coetzee's Age of Iron."  Aesthetics and Ideology. Ed. George Levine. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1994. 243-263.

Attridge, Derek. "Trusting the Other: Ethics and Politics in J. M. Coetzee's Age of Iron." South Atlantic Quarterly, 93.1 (1994): 59-82.

Attwell, David. "The Problem of History in the Fiction of J. M. Coetzee." Rendering Things Visible: Essays on South African Literary Culture of the 1970s and 1980s. Ed. Martin Trump. Johannesburg: Ravan, 1990. 94-133.

Attwell, David. "Race in Disgrace." [Special Issue devoted to Disgrace, by J. M. Coetzee.]  Interventions: The International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 4.3 (Nov. 2002): 331-341.

Full text in .pdf format available to COCC students from EBSCO Academic Search Premier online subscription database

Banville, John. "Being and Nothingness." Rev. of Elizabeth Costello, by J. M. Coetzee. Nation 3 Nov. 2003: 30-33 (4pp). Academic Search Premier (11125301). EBSCOhost. Central Oregon Community College Library, Bend, OR. 6 Sep. 2004. [EC above]

EBSCO Academic Search Premier subscription database articles are available online to COCC students.

Barnard, Rita. "Coetzee's Country Ways." [Special Issue devoted to Disgrace, by J. M. Coetzee.]  Interventions: The International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 4.3 (Nov. 2002): 384-394.

Full text in .pdf format available to COCC students from EBSCO Academic Search Premier online subscription database

Barnard, Rita. "J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace and the South African Pastoral." Contemporary Literature: 44.2 (Summer 2003): 199-224.

Full text in .pdf format available to COCC students from EBSCO Academic Search Premier online subscription database

Barney, Richard A. "Between Swift and Kafka." J. M. Coetzee Special Section. World Literature Today 78.1 (Jan.-April 2004): 17-23 (7pp). Academic Search Premier (11810873). EBSCOhost. Central Oregon Community College Library, Bend, OR. 6 Sep. 2004.

EBSCO Academic Search Premier subscription database articles are available online to COCC students.

Barzun, Jacques. "Byron and the Byronic." Atlantic Monthly August 1953.  The Atlantic Online. 2004. 1 Sept. 2004 <http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/53aug/barzun.htm>. 

Bishop, G. Scott. "J. M. Coetzee's Foe: A Culmination and a Solution to a Problem of White Identity." World Literature Today 64.1 (Winter 1990): 54-57.

Full text available to COCC students from Gale Literature Resource Center online subscription database.

Blyn, Sara. "Apartheid Literature." Fall 2001. Post Colonial Studies at Emory. Ed. Deepika Bahri (Dept. of English, Emory Univ., Atlanta, GA). 4 Sep. 2004 <http://www.emory.edu/ENGLISH/Bahri/apartlit.html>.

Boehmer, Elleke. "Not Saying Sorry, Not Speaking Pain: Gender Implications in Disgrace." [Special Issue devoted to Disgrace, by J. M. Coetzee.]  Interventions: The International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 4.3 (Nov. 2002): 342-351.

Full text in .pdf format available to COCC students from EBSCO Academic Search Premier online subscription database

Brink, André P. "Writing Against Big Brother: Notes on Apocalyptic Fiction in South Africa." World Literature Today 58.2 (1984): 189-194.

Byrne, Deirdre C. "Science Fiction in South Africa." Correspondents Abroad. PMLA 119.3 (May 2004): 522-529.

Carusi, Annamaria. "Foe: The Narrative and Power." Journal of Literary Studies 5.2 (1989): 134-144. 

Castillo, Debra A. "The Composition of the Self in Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians." Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction 27.2 (Winter 1986): 78-90. 

Chapman, Michael. "The Writing of Politics and the Politics of Writing: On Reading Dovey on Reading Lacan on Reading Coetzee on Reading . . . (?)." Journal of Literary Studies 4.3 (1988): 327-341.

Clark, David Draper. Editor's Note: J. M. Coetzee Special Section. World Literature Today 78.1 (Jan.-April 2004): 3-5 (3pp). Academic Search Premier (11810867). EBSCOhost. Central Oregon Community College Library, Bend, OR. 6 Sep. 2004.

EBSCO Academic Search Premier subscription database articles are available online to COCC students.

Clayton, Cherry. "Uprooting the Malignant Fictions." Rev. of White Writing, by J. M. Coetzee; and Hopes and Impediments, by Chinua Achebe. The Times Literary Supplement [No. 4460] 23 September 1988: 1043.

"Coetzee Wins Nobel Literature Prize." BBC News, World ed., 2 Oct. 2003. BBC, 2004. 3 Sep. 2004 <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/3158278.stm>.

Coetzee, J. M. "Excerpts from Disgrace." [Pages 111-112 and 183-184.] "J. M. Coetzee - Prose." 6 Nov. 2003. Nobel e-Museum. Nobel Foundation, 2004. 4 Sep. 2004 <http://www.nobel.se/literature/laureates/2003/coetzee-prose.html>.

Coetzee, J. M. "Fever and Flame." [Excerpt from Youth.] American Scholar 71.3 (Summer 2002): 17 (9pp.) Academic Search Premier (7254252). EBSCOhost. Central Oregon Community College Library, Bend, OR. 6 Sep. 2004.

EBSCO Academic Search Premier subscription database articles are available online to COCC students.

Coetzee, J. M. "He and His Man." Nobel Lecture 2003. PMLA 119.3 (May 2004): 547-552.

Coetzee, J. M. "He and His Man." "J. M. Coetzee - Nobel Lecture." [English language version.] 7 Dec. 2003. Nobel e-Museum. Nobel Foundation, 2004. 4 Sep. 2004 <http://www.nobel.se/literature/laureates/2003/coetzee-lecture-e.html>.

Coetzee, J. M. "How I Learned about America - and Africa - in Texas." J. M. Coetzee Special Section. World Literature Today 78.1 (Jan.-April 2004): 6-7 (2pp). Academic Search Premier (11810868). EBSCOhost. Central Oregon Community College Library, Bend, OR. 6 Sep. 2004.

EBSCO Academic Search Premier subscription database articles are available online to COCC students.
Abstract: Account by Coetzee about when he was a graduate student at the University of Texas, Austin in the 1960s. First published in the New York Times, April 15, 1984:
http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/11/02/home/coetzee-learned.html

Coetzee, J. M. "Into the Dark Chamber: The Novelist and South Africa." New York Times 12 Jan. 1986, Late City Final ed., sec. 7: 13. New York Times on the Web, 1998. 31 Aug. 2004 <http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/11/02/home/coetzee-chamber.html>.

Cooper, Rand Richards. "Portrait of the Writer as an Afrikaner." Rev. of Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life, by J. M. Coetzee. New York Times 2 Nov. 1997. New York Times on the Web. 1997. 31 Aug. 2004 <http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/11/02/reviews/971102.02coopert.html>.

Cornwell, Gareth. "Realism, Rape, and J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace." Critique 43.4 (June 2002): 307 (16pp).  Academic Search Premier (7254252). EBSCOhost. Central Oregon Community College Library, Bend, OR. 6 Sep. 2004.

EBSCO Academic Search Premier subscription database articles are available online to COCC students.

Cowley, Jason. "Despite a Booker Nomination and a Nobel Prize, These Writers, Unheard in Their Own Land, Feel Oppressed by Emptiness." New Statesman 13 Oct. 2003: 22 (3pp). Academic Search Premier (11030849). EBSCOhost. Central Oregon Community College Library, Bend, OR. 6 Sep. 2004.

EBSCO Academic Search Premier subscription database articles are available online to COCC students.

Cowley, Jason. "J. M. Coetzee: The Ideal Chronicler of the New South Africa, He Deserves to make Literary History as a Double Booker Winner." New Statesman 25 Oct. 1999:18 (3pp). Academic Search Premier (2436548). EBSCOhost. Central Oregon Community College Library, Bend, OR. 6 Sep. 2004.

EBSCO Academic Search Premier subscription database articles are available online to COCC students.

de Graef, Ortwin. "Suffering, Sympathy, Circulation: Smith, Wordsworth, Coetzee (But There's a Dog)." European Journal of English Studies 7.3 (2003): 311-331.

Full text in .pdf format available to COCC students from EBSCO Academic Search Premier online subscription database

De Kock, Leon. "Literature, Politics and Universalism: A Debate between Es'kia Mphahlele and J. M. Coetzee." Journal of Literary Studies 3.4 (1987): 35-48.

Diala, Isidore. "Nadine Gordimer, J. M. Coetzee, and Andre Brink: Guilt, Expiation, and the Reconciliation Process in Post-Apartheid South Africa." Journal of Modern Literature 25.2 (Winter 2001/2002): 50-68.

Full text in .pdf format available to COCC students from EBSCO Academic Search Premier online subscription database

Dodd, Josephine. "Naming and Framing: Naturalization and Colonization in J. M. Coetzee's In the Heart of the Country." World Literature Written in English 27.2 (Autumn 1987): 153-61.

Dovey, Teresa. "Coetzee and His Critics: The Case of Dusklands." English in Africa 14.2 (1987): 15-30.

Dovey, Teresa. "The Intersection of Postmodern, Postcolonial and Feminist Discourse in J. M. Coetzee's Foe." Journal of Literary Studies 5.2 (1989): 119-133.

Dovey, Teresa. The Novels of J.M. Coetzee: Lacanian Allegories. Cape Town and Johannesburg, South Africa: Donker, 1988.

LC Call No. PR9369.3.C58 Z75 1988 - available to COCC students from Summit

Du Plessis, Michael. "Bodies and Signs: Inscriptions of Femininity in John Coetzee and Wilma Stockenström." Journal of Literary Studies 4.1 (1988): 118-128.

Durrant, Sam. "Bearing Witness to Apartheid: J. M. Coetzee's Inconsolable Works of Mourning." Contemporary Literature 40.3 (Fall 1999): 430 (34pp). Academic Search Premier (2373151). EBSCOhost. Central Oregon Community College Library, Bend, OR. 6 Sep. 2004.

EBSCO Academic Search Premier subscription database articles are available online to COCC students.

Durrant, Sam. Postcolonial Narrative and the Work of Mourning: J. M. Coetzee, Wilson Harris, and Toni Morrison. Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 2004.

LC Call No. PR9369.3.C58 Z65 2004 -available from Summit

Eckstein, Barbara. "The Body, the Word, and the State: J. M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians." Novel 22.2 (1989): 175-198.

Farrad, Grant. "The Mundanacity of Violence: Living in a State of Disgrace." [Special Issue devoted to Disgrace, by J. M. Coetzee.]  Interventions: The International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 4.3 (Nov. 2002): 3.

Full text in .pdf format available to COCC students from EBSCO Academic Search Premier online subscription database

"Featured Author: J. M. Coetzee, with News and Reviews from the Archives of The New York Times." New York Times on the Web, 1999. 31 Aug. 2004 <http://www.nytimes.com/books/99/11/28/specials/coetzee.html>.

Fitzgerald, Michael. "Serendipity." J. M. Coetzee Special Section. World Literature Today 78.1 (Jan.-April 2004): 24-25 (2pp). Academic Search Premier (11810874). EBSCOhost. Central Oregon Community College Library, Bend, OR. 6 Sep. 2004.

EBSCO Academic Search Premier subscription database articles are available online to COCC students.

Fraser, David. Rev. of The Lives of Animals, by J. M. Coetzee. Quarterly Review of Biology 76.2 (June 2001): 215 (2pp). Academic Search Premier (4647139). EBSCOhost. Central Oregon Community College Library, Bend, OR. 6 Sep. 2004.

EBSCO Academic Search Premier subscription database articles are available online to COCC students.

Gallagher, Susan VanZanten. A Story of South Africa: J. M. Coetzee's Fiction in Context. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1991.

LC Call No. PR9369.3.C58 Z66 1991 - available from Summit

Gallagher, Susan Van Zanten. "Torture and the Novel: J. M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians." Contemporary Literature 29.2 (Summer 1988): 277-85.

Gardiner, Allan. "J. M. Coetzee's Dusklands: Colonial Encounters of the Robinsonian Kind." World Literature Written in English 27.2 (Autumn 1987): 174-84.

Gillmer, Joan. "The Motif of the Damaged Child in the Work of J. M. Coetzee." Momentum: On Recent South African Writing. Ed. M. J. Daymond, J. U. Jacobs, and Margaret Lenta. Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press and London: Currey, 1984. 107-120.

Glenn-Lauga, Catherine. "The Hearerly Text: Sea Shells on the Sea Shore." Journal of Literary Studies 5.2 (1989): 194-214.

Gorra, Michael. "After the Fall." Rev. of Disgrace, by J. M. Coetzee. New York Times 28 Nov. 1999. New York Times on the Web, 1999. 31 Aug. 2004 <http://www.nytimes.com/books/99/11/28/reviews/991128.28gorrat.html>.

COCC Library holds periodical subscription to The New York Times.

Graham, Lucy Valerie. "Reading the Unspeakable: Rape in J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace." Journal of Southern African Studies 29.2 (June 2003): 433-444.

Full text in .pdf format available to COCC students from EBSCO Academic Search Premier online subscription database

Gunnars, Kristjana, and Abdulrazak Gurnah. "A Writer's Writer: Two Perspectives." J. M. Coetzee Special Section. World Literature Today 78.1 (Jan.-April 2004): 11-13 (3pp). Academic Search Premier (11810871). EBSCOhost. Central Oregon Community College Library, Bend, OR. 6 Sep. 2004.

EBSCO Academic Search Premier subscription database articles are available online to COCC students.

Head, Dominic. J.M. Coetzee. Cambridge Studies in African and Caribbean Literature. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1997.

LC Call No. PR9369.3.C58 Z68 1997 - available from Summit

Hewson, Kelly. "Making the `Revolutionary Gesture': Nadine Gordimer, J. M. Coetzee and Some Variations on the Writer's Responsibility." Ariel: A Review of International English Literature 19.4 (October 1988): 55-72.

Holland, Michael. "'Plink-Plunk': Unforgetting the Present in Coetzee's Disgrace." [Special Issue devoted to Disgrace, by J. M. Coetzee.]  Interventions: The International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 4.3 (Nov. 2002): 395-404.

Full text in .pdf format available to COCC students from EBSCO Academic Search Premier online subscription database

Hook, Derek. Rev. of Stranger Shores: Essays 1986-1999, by J. M. Coetzee. Theoria: A Journal of Social and Political Theory April 2004: 143-145.

Full text in .pdf format available to COCC students from EBSCO Academic Search Premier online subscription database

Huggan, Graham, and Stephen Watson, ed. Critical Perspectives on J.M. Coetzee. New York : St. Martin's Press, 1996.

LC Call No. PR9369.3.C58 Z638 1996 - available from Summit

"J. M. Coetzee (1940- )." The Authors. Guardian Unlimited Books [Manchester, UK], Guardian Newspapers, 2004. 31 Aug. 2004 <http://books.guardian.co.uk/authors/author/0,5917,-43,00.html>.

Page offers links to several review articles, as well as excerpts from Coetzee's works:
"JM Coetzee's Nobel Lecture: 'He and His Man'":
 http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/generalfiction/story/0,6000,1103195,00.html
"Lost in London," Excerpt from Youth: Scenes from Provincial Life II (memoir):
 http://books.guardian.co.uk/extracts/story/0,6761,1059934,00.html
"'That Is Not Where I Come From,'" Excerpt from Elizabeth Costello (novel):
http://books.guardian.co.uk/extracts/story/0,6761,1055012,00.html
"The Reluctant Guest of Honour," Excerpt from Elizabeth Costello (novel):
http://books.guardian.co.uk/extracts/story/0,6761,1027772,00.html

"J. M. Coetzee: Banquet Speech." 10 Dec. 2003. Nobel e-Museum. Nobel Foundation, 2003. 4 Sep. 2004 <http://www.nobel.se/literature/laureates/2003/coetzee-speech-e.html>.

“J(ohn) M(axwell) Coetzee, 1940- .” 2 Oct. 2003.  Contemporary Authors Online.  Gale, 2003.  Gale Literature Resource Center [Online Subscription Database]. The Gale Group, 2004. Central Oregon Community College Library, Bend, OR. 17 August 2004.

Gale Literature Resource Center subscription database articles are available online to COCC students.

Jacobson, Warren. "The Booker Prize." Fall 1997 [sic]. Post Colonial Studies at Emory. Ed. Deepika Bahri (Dept. of English, Emory Univ., Atlanta, GA). 4 Sep. 2004 <http://www.emory.edu/ENGLISH/Bahri/Booker.html>.

Jolly, Rosemary Jane. Colonization, Violence, and Narration in White South African Writing: Andre Brink, Breyten Breytenbach, and J. M. Coetzee. Athens, OH: Ohio Univ. Press, 1996.

Knox-Shaw, Peter. "Dusklands: A Metaphysics of Violence." Commonwealth Novel in English 2.1 (1983): 65-81.

Kossew, Sue. "The Anxiety of Authorship: J. M. Coetzee's The Master of Petersburg (1994) and André Brink's On the Contrary (1993)." English in Africa 23.1 (1986): 67-88.

Kossew, Sue. Pen and Power: A Post-Colonial Reading of J.M. Coetzee and André Brink. Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 1996.

Kossew, Sue. "The Politics of Shame and Redemption in J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace." Research in African Literatures 34.2 (Summer 2003): 155-162.

Full text in .pdf format available to COCC students from EBSCO Academic Search Premier online subscription database

Kossew, Sue, ed. Critical Essays on J. M. Coetzee. Critical Essays on World Literature. New York: G. K. Hall, 1998.

Call No. PR9369.3.C58 Z637 1998 -  available to COCC students from Summit

Kurtz, J. Roger. Rev. of Stranger Shores: Literary Essays 1886-1999, by J. M. Coetzee. World Literature Today 76.2 (Spring 2002): 249. Academic Search Premier (6991882). EBSCOhost. Central Oregon Community College Library, Bend, OR. 6 Sep. 2004.

EBSCO Academic Search Premier subscription database articles are available online to COCC students.

Lee, Hermione. "The Rest Is Silence." Rev. of Elizabeth Costello, by J. M. Coetzee. Guardian [Manchester, UK] 30 Aug. 2003. Guardian Unlimited Books, Guardian Newspapers, 2004. 31 Aug. 2004 <http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/generalfiction/0,6121,1031735,00.html>.

Lehmann-Haupt, Christopher. "Caught in Shifting Values (and Plot)." Rev. of Disgrace, by J. M. Coetzee. Books of the Times. New York Times 11 Nov. 1999. New York Times on the Web, 1999. 31 Aug. 2004 <http://www.nytimes.com/books/99/11/07/daily/111199disgrace-book-review.html>.

Lenta, Margaret. "Autrebiography: J. M. Coetzee's Boyhood and Youth." English in Africa 30.1 (May 2003): 157-169.

Full text in .pdf format available to COCC students from EBSCO Academic Search Premier online subscription database

Lenta, Margaret. "Fictions of the Future." English Academy Review 5 (1988): 133-145.

Lyall, Sarah. "J. M. Coetzee's 'Disgrace' Wins Booker Prize." New York Times 26 Oct. 1999. New York Times on the Web, 1999. 31 Aug. 2004 <http://www.nytimes.com/library/books/10269coetzee-booker.html>.

Maes-Jelinek, Hena. "Ambivalent Clio: J. M. Coetzee's In the Heart of the Country and Wilson Harris's Carnival." Journal of Commonwealth Literature 22.1 (1987): 87-98.

Malan, Rian. "Only the Big Questions." Time 13 Oct. 2003: 80 (1p). Academic Search Premier (10996073). EBSCOhost. Central Oregon Community College Library, Bend, OR. 6 Sep. 2004.

EBSCO Academic Search Premier subscription database articles are available online to COCC students.

Marais, Michael.  “J. M. Coetzee, February 9, 1940- .”  Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 225: South African Writers.  Ed. Paul A. Scanlon.  Detroit: Gale Group, 2000. 131-149. Gale Literature Resource Center [Online Subscription Database]. The Gale Group, 2004. Central Oregon Community College Library, Bend, OR. 17 August 2004. 

Marais, Michael. "Languages of Power: A Story of Reading Michael K/Michael K." English in Africa 16.2 (1989): 31-48.

Marais, Michael. "Places of Pigs: The Tension between Implication and Transcendence in J. M. Coetzee's Age of Iron and The Master of Petersburg." Journal of Commonwealth Literature 31.1 (1996): 83-96.

Martin, Richard G. "Narrative, History, Ideology: A Study of Waiting for the Barbarians and Burger's Daughter." Ariel: A Review of International English Literature 17.3 (July 1986): 3-21.

The Man Booker Prize 2004 [official web site]. 31 Aug. 2004 <http://www.manbookerprize.co.uk/>.

   "The Booker Prize for Fiction was originally set up by Booker plc in 1969 to reward merit, raise the stature of the author in the eyes of the public and encourage an interest in contemporary quality fiction. In April 2002, it was announced that the Man Group had been chosen by the Booker Prize Foundation as the new sponsor of the Booker Prize. The sponsorship will run until 2006 during which time the prize will be known as the Man Booker Prize."
   "The Man Booker International Prize is unique in the world of literature in that it can be won by an author of any nationality, providing that his or her work is available in the English language. It will be awarded every second year. An author can only win the award once."
Source: The Man Booker International Prize 2005 [official web site]. 31 Aug. 2004 <http://www.manbookerinternational.com/intro.html>.

Masoga, Mogomme Alpheus. "Towards Sacrificial-Cleansing Ritual in South Africa: An Indigenous African View of Truth and Reconciliation." Alternation: International Journal for the Study of Southern African Literature and Languages 6.1 (1999). 4 Sep. 2004 <http://sing.reshma.tripod.com/alternation/alternation6_1/14MASOG.htm>.

McCrum, Robert. "The Voice of Africa: Robert McCrum on Nobel Prize-winner JM Coetzee's Timeless Brilliance." The Observer 5 Oct. 2003. Guardian Unlimited Books [Manchester, UK], Guardian Newspapers, 2004. 31 Aug. 2004 <http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/generalfiction/story/0,6000,1055828,00.html>.

McDonald, Peter D. "Disgrace Effects." [Special Issue devoted to Disgrace, by J. M. Coetzee.]  Interventions: The International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 4.3 (Nov. 2002): 321-330.

Full text in .pdf format available to COCC students from EBSCO Academic Search Premier online subscription database

Middlemiss, Perry. "1999 Booker Prize." Perry Middlemiss, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia; 2002. 31 Aug. 2004 <http://www.middlemiss.org/lit/prizes/booker/booker1999.html>.

Moore, John Rees. "Coetzee and the Precarious Lives of People and Animals." Rev. of Disgrace and The Lives of Animals, by J. M. Coetzee. Sewanee Review 109.3 (Summer 2001): 462-474.

Full text in .pdf format available to COCC students from EBSCO Academic Search Premier online subscription database

Moore, John Rees. "J. M. Coetzee and Foe." The Sewanee Review 98.1 (Winter 1990): 152-59. Olsen, Lance. "The Presence of Absence: Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians." Ariel: A Review of International English Literature 16.2 (April 1985): 47-56.

Morphet, Tony. "Reading Coetzee in South Africa." J. M. Coetzee Special Section. World Literature Today 78.1 (Jan.-April 2004): 14-16 (3pp). Academic Search Premier (11810872). EBSCOhost. Central Oregon Community College Library, Bend, OR. 6 Sep. 2004.

EBSCO Academic Search Premier subscription database articles are available online to COCC students.

Morphet, Tony. "Two Interviews with J. M. Coetzee, 1983 and 1987." TriQuarterly 69 (Spring/Summer 1987): 454-464.

Moses, Michael Valdez.  "Solitary Walkers: Rousseau and Coetzee's Life and Times of Michael K." South Atlantic Quarterly 93.1 (1994): 131-156.

Moses, Michael Valdez, ed. The Writings of J. M. Coetzee. Special ed. of The South Atlantic Quarterly '93 [Winter 1994].

“The Nobel Prize in Literature: John Maxwell Coetzee.”  Press Release, 2 Oct. 2003.  The Permanent Secretary, Swedish Academy. Nobel e-Museum. Nobel Foundation, 2004. 21 August 2004 <http://www.nobel.se/literature/laureates/2003/press.html>.

Noguchi, Mai. "Apartheid." Fall 2000. Post Colonial Studies at Emory. Ed. Deepika Bahri (Dept. of English, Emory Univ., Atlanta, GA). 4 Sep. 2004 <http://www.emory.edu/ENGLISH/Bahri/apart.html>.

Olsen, Lance. "The Presence of Absence: Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians." Ariel 16.2 (1985): 47-56.

Pechey, Graham. "Coetzee's Purgatorial Africa: The Case of Disgrace." Editorial. [Special Issue devoted to Disgrace, by J. M. Coetzee.]  Interventions: The International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 4.3 (Nov. 2002): 374-383.

Full text in .pdf format available to COCC students from EBSCO Academic Search Premier online subscription database

Penner, [Dick] Allen Richard. Countries of the Mind: The Fiction of J.M. Coetzee. New York and Westport, CN: Greenwood Press, 1989.

Call No. PR9369.3.C58 Z87 1989 -  available from Summit

Penner, Dick. "J. M. Coetzee's Foe: The Muse, the Absurd, and the Colonial Dilemma." World Literature Written in English 27.2 (Autumn 1987): 207-15.

Penner, Dick. "Sight, Blindness and Double-thought in J. M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians." World Literature Written in English 26.1 (Spring 1986): 34-45.

Post, Robert M. "Oppression in the Fiction of J. M. Coetzee." Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction 27.2 (Winter 1986): 67-77.

Post, Robert M.. "The Noise of Freedom: J. M. Coetzee's Foe." Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 30.3 (Spring 1989): 143-54.

Price, Jonathan. "J. M. Coetzee." Fall 2000. Post Colonial Studies at Emory. Ed. Deepika Bahri (Dept. of English, Emory Univ., Atlanta, GA). 4 Sep. 2004 <http://www.emory.edu/ENGLISH/Bahri/Coetzee.html>.

Regan, Tom, and Martin Rowe. "Animal Rights: What the Nobel Committee Failed to Note." International Herald Tribune 19 Dec. 2003. Common Dreams NewsCenter, 1997-2004. 5 Sep. 2004 <http://www.commondreams.org/views03/1219-11.htm>.

Renders, Luc. "J. M. Coetzee's Michael K: Starving in a Land of Plenty." Literary Gastronomy. Ed. David Bevan. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1988. 95-102.

Rhedin, Folke. "Interview [with J. M. Coetzee]." Kunapipi 6.1 (1984): 6-11.

Rich, Paul. "Apartheid and the Decline of Civilization Idea: An Essay on Nadine Gordimer's July's People and J. M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians." Research in African Literatures 15 (1984): 365-393.

Rich, Paul. "Tradition and Revolt in South African Fiction: The Novels of André Brink, Nadine Gordimer and J. M. Coetzee." Journal of Southern African Studies 9.1 (1982): 54-73.

Roberts, Sheila. "Cinderella's Mothers: J. M. Coetzee's In the Heart of the Country." English in Africa 19.1 (1992): 21-33.

Sanders, Mark. "Disgrace." [Special Issue devoted to Disgrace, by J. M. Coetzee.]  Interventions: The International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 4.3 (Nov. 2002): 363-373.

Full text in .pdf format available to COCC students from EBSCO Academic Search Premier online subscription database

Sarvan, Charles. "Disgrace: A Path to Grace?" J. M. Coetzee Special Section. World Literature Today 78.1 (Jan.-April 2004): 26-29 (4pp). Academic Search Premier (11810875). EBSCOhost. Central Oregon Community College Library, Bend, OR. 6 Sep. 2004.

EBSCO Academic Search Premier subscription database articles are available online to COCC students.

Simpson, David. "Neither Rushdie nor Nobody: J. M. Coetzee on Censorship and Offense." Critical Resources. Pretexts: Literary and Cultural Studies 10.1 (July 2001): 119-128.

Full text in .pdf format available to COCC students from EBSCO Academic Search Premier online subscription database

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. "Theory in the Margin: Coetzee's Foe Reading Defoe's Crusoe/Roxana." English in Africa 17.2 (1990): 1-23.

Swedish Academy. "J. M. Coetzee - Bibliography." 3 May 2004. Nobel e-Museum. Nobel Foundation, 2004. 4 Sep. 2004 <http://www.nobel.se/literature/laureates/2003/coetzee-bibl.html>.

Szalai, Jennifer. "Harvest of a Quiet Eye: J. M. Coetzee and the Art of Lucidity." Harper's Magazine July 2004: 85-89.

Taylor, D. J. "The Castaway: DJ Taylor on JM Coetzee's Intriguing Nobel Acceptance Speech." Guardian 13 Dec. 2003. Guardian Unlimited Books [Manchester, UK], Guardian Newspapers, 2004. 4 Sep. 2004 <http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/generalfiction/story/0,6000,1105841,00.html>.

Thornton, Lawrence. "Apartheid's Last Vicious Gasps." Rev. of Age of Iron, by J. M. Coetzee. New York Times 23 Sept. 1990, Late ed.- Final, sec. 7: 7. New York Times on the Web, 1998. 31 Aug. 2004 <http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/11/02/home/coetzee-iron.html>.

Tiffin, H. M. "J. M. Coetzee: Overview." Contemporary Novelists. 6th ed. Ed. Susan Windisch Brown. St. James Press, 1996. Rpt. Gale Literature Resource Center [Online Subscription Database]. The Gale Group, 2004. Central Oregon Community College Library, Bend, OR. 17 August 2004. 

Full text available to COCC students from Gale Literature Resource Center online subscription database.

Vaughan, Michael. "Literature and Politics: Currents in South African Writing in the Seventies." Journal of Southern African Studies 9.1 (1982): 118-138.

Wade, Jean-Philippe. "The Allegorical Text and History: J. M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians."  Journal of Literary Studies 6.4 (1990): 275-288.

Wästberg, Per. “The Nobel Prize in Literature 2003.”  Presentation Speech, Stockholm Concert Hall.  Nobel e-Museum. Nobel Foundation, Swedish Academy. 2003.  August 21 2004 <http://www.nobel.se/literature/laureates/2003/presentation-speech.html>.

Watson, Stephen. "Colonialism and the Novels of J. M. Coetzee." Research in African Literatures 17.3 (Fall 1986): 370-92.

Watson, Stephen. "Speaking: J. M. Coetzee." [Interview] Speak 1.3 (1978): 21-24.

West, Paul. "The Novelist and the Hangman: When Horror Invades Protocol." Harper's Magazine July 2004: 89+.

Williams, Paul. "Foe: The Story of Silence." English Studies in Africa 31.1 (1988): 33-39.

Wood, W. J. B. "Dusklands and 'The Impregnable Stronghold of the Intellect.'" Theoria 54 (May 1980): 13-23.

Wood, W. J. B. "Waiting for the Barbarians: Two Sides of Imperial Rule and Some Related Considerations." Momentum: On Recent South African Writing. Ed. M. J. Daymond, J. U. Jacobs, and Margaret Lenta. Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press and London: Currey, 1984. 129-140.

Yeoh, Gilbert. "J. M. Coetzee and Samuel Beckett: Ethics, Truth Telling, and Self-Deception." Critique 44.4 (Summer 2003): 331-348 (18pp). Academic Search Premier (10853701). EBSCOhost. Central Oregon Community College Library, Bend, OR. 6 Sep. 2004.

EBSCO Academic Search Premier subscription database articles are available online to COCC students.

Zamora, Lois Parkinson. "Allegories of Power in the Fiction of J. M. Coetzee." Journal of Literary Studies 2.1 (1986): 1-14.

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J. M. Coetzee: Biography & Bibliography | Disgrace (1999) Reading Guide

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DRAFT material for Coetzee's Major Works -
The rest of this section is under construction!!

1994: The Master of Petersburg. [novel] First Published: London: Secker & Warburg, 1994; New York: Viking, 1994.

LC Call No.  PR9369.3.C58 M3 . . .  - one or more editions available from Summit

Awards: Premio Modello, 1994, and Irish Times International Fiction Prize, 1995, for The Master of Petersburg;

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TIFFIN:

In The Master of Petersburg, Coetzee examines the child products of another "age of iron" through Dostoevsky's relationship with his step-son, in a rather different context of violence and revolution, that of prerevolutionary St. Petersburg. In spite of the setting, there are echoes of South Africa in the poverty and violence sponsored by an oppressive regime and in the mysterious death of Dostoevsky's step-son, Pavel, who may have been murdered by one of his revolutionary comrades (Nechaev), or by the police, or who may have committed suicide. The novel is also about life and writing, and about the compelling authority of artistic genius, which is shown to be inescapably grounded in a betrayal as profound and obsessive as that of the revolutionary Nechaev himself.

 

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In Coetzee's next novel, The Master of Petersburg, the central character is the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky, but the plot is only loosely based on his real life. In Coetzee's story, the novelist goes to St. Petersburg upon the death of his stepson, Pavel. He is devastated by grief for the young man, and begins an inquiry into his death. He discovers that Pavel was involved with a group of nihilists and was probably murdered either by their leader or by the police. During the course of his anguished investigation, Dostoevsky's creative processes are exposed; Coetzee shows him beginning work on his novel The Possessed.

In real life, Dostoevsky did have a stepson named Pavel; but he was a foppish idler, a constant source of annoyance and embarrassment to the writer. The younger man outlived his stepfather by some twenty years, and as Dostoevsky died, he would not allow Pavel near his deathbed. Some reviewers were untroubled by Coetzee's manipulation of the facts. "This is not, after all, a book about the real Dostoevsky; his name, and some facts connected to it, form a mask behind which Coetzee enacts a drama of parenthood, politics and authorship," Harriett Gilbert explained in New Statesman and Society. She went on to praise Coetzee's depiction of "the barbed-wire coils of grief and anger, of guilt, of sexual rivalry and envy, that Fyodor Mikhailovich negotiates as he enters Pavel's hidden life. From the moment he presses his face to the lad's white suit to inhale his smell, to when he sits down, picks up his pen and commits a paternal novelist's betrayal, his pain is depicted with such harsh clarity that pity is burnt away. If the novel begins uncertainly, it ends with scorching self-confidence."

“J(ohn) M(axwell) Coetzee, 1940- .” 2 Oct. 2003.  Contemporary Authors Online.  Gale, 2003.  Gale Literature Resource Center [Online Subscription Database]. The Gale Group, 2004. Central Oregon Community College Library, Bend, OR. 17 August 2004.

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Summary: The novel recreates the world of the Russian writer, Dostoevsky, with him as the protagonist. He returns from exile to St. Petersburg to investigate the death of his stepson, officially a suicide, but as he was a revolutionary Dostoevsky suspects murder.

In 1991 Coetzee spent a year as visiting professor of English at Harvard University. His next novel, The Master of Petersburg, was published in 1994 and was therefore written during the period in which the apartheid government finally collapsed. Far from dealing with this momentous transition, though, The Master of Petersburg is set in late-nineteenth-century Russia.

So, while Age of Iron seemed to suggest a desire on Coetzee's part to engage more directly with the overt politics of the day in South Africa, the more recent novel appears to indicate a return to the strategy of temporal and geographical displacement that characterizes his earlier work. Apart from this difference, these two novels are remarkably similar.

As in the earlier text, in The Master of Petersburg Coetzee deals with the deforming impact of societal structures of power and the role that literature plays in either reinforcing or resisting these structures. Set in St. Petersburg, this novel focuses on the murder of a young student, Ivanov, by a group of nihilists led by Sergei Nechaev. This incident is probably best remembered as the historical event that prompted Fyodor Dostoyevsky to write The Devils (1871), a work in which he tried to link moral evil and political nihilism. Dostoyevsky achieved this identification by means of the biblical story of the Gadarene swine, a tale in which unclean devils, having been exorcized from a sick man by Jesus Christ, enter a herd of swine. This story generates in the novel a series of analogies that suggest Russia is a "sick man" possessed by devils and that the swine that the devils enter on being exorcized are the revolutionaries.

In The Master of Petersburg Coetzee employs the same parallels--as becomes apparent when his own character, Dostoyevsky, argues that it is futile to imprison revolutionaries such as Sergei Nechaev since nihilism is a "spirit" for which the individual is merely a "vehicle," a "host." This parallelism does not mean, however, that Coetzee shares the actual Dostoyevsky 's conviction that the nihilists are possessed by the devil. It is significant in this regard that Coetzee applies the story of the Gadarene swine not only to Russia and the phenomenon of revolutionary nihilism but also to Dostoyevsky himself and his literary response to this phenomenon. Thus, in The Master of Petersburg, Dostoyevsky is depicted as a "sick man" possessed by devils. And, while engaging in sexual intercourse with him, Anna Sergeyevna, at the onset of climax, utters the word "devil." Importantly, in this scene the sexual act is depicted as both an inspiration and an exorcism, with Anna Sergeyevna occupying the dual role of muse and exorcist. As the novel ends shortly afterward with Dostoyevsky commencing work on The Devils, the implication is, therefore, that this text is also to be equated with the exorcized spirits in the story of the Gadarene swine. The further inference is that the readers within whom copies of the novel can be said to take up residence correspond to the swine in the biblical story.

Coetzee's reworking of the story of the Gadarene swine in The Master of Petersburg appears to be a comment on the implication of writer and literature in the power dynamics or "sickness" of the social context in which they are located. Through applying the story to the artist and the artistic process itself, Coetzee suggests that Dostoyevsky and his work are not immune to the "sickness" of Russia. Both are a part of Russia and are therefore also "sick."

The point Coetzee makes in this text is, therefore, similar to that which emerges from his previous novel: that the literature produced in an "age of iron," that is, a society and a period that have been "defined" and thus debased by "unnatural structures of power," is "a less than fully human literature." In its inevitable preoccupation with "power and the torsions of power," such literature is as "stunted" and "deformed" as the life that it seeks to represent. Accordingly, it colludes with the networks of power that have dehumanized the society. In this regard, it is significant that the imagery Coetzee uses in The Master of Petersburg to indicate literature's ability to brutalize is similar to that which he uses in Age of Iron to suggest the dehumanizing impact of the state's power relations. In both cases, the imagery is of a metamorphosis into swine.

(Marais, cite DLB article!!).

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1999: Disgrace. [novel] New York: Viking, 1999.

LC Call No. PR9369.3.C58 D5 [date] . . . - one or more editions available from Summit

Awards: Booker Prize, 1999, National Book League and Commonwealth Writer's Prize: Best Novel, for Disgrace

"Excerpts from Disgrace." [Pages 111-112 and 183-184.] "J. M. Coetzee - Prose."
6 Nov. 2003. Nobel e-Museum. Nobel Foundation, 2004. 4 Sep. 2004 <http://www.nobel.se/literature/laureates/2003/coetzee-prose.html>.

Summary:

The third book published in 1999 was Coetzee's eighth novel, Disgrace, which is set in South Africa in the late 1990s. The protagonist, David Lurie, is a fifty-two-year-old professor at the Technical University of Cape Town. The novel opens with a consideration of the fate of an aging scholar, a specialist in the Romantic poets who is reduced to teaching introductory courses in "communications," which he despises, as the university has changed its emphasis from liberal arts to that of "technical education." Lurie has a brief affair with Melanie, one of his female students, who is oddly passive and ambivalent about the relationship. When the affair comes to the attention of the university authorities--Lurie suspects that Melanie's boyfriend has informed on him--Lurie is told by the school administration to apologize and enter into counseling if he wishes to save his career. Seeing himself as being scapegoated by the forces of political correctness, he pleads guilty to the charge of sexual harassment but refuses to apologize or be repentant.

Leaving the university in disgrace, Lurie goes to visit his lesbian daughter, Lucy, who lives alone on a smallholding in the Eastern Cape. She is eking out a meager existence managing dog kennels and raising flowers and vegetables for market in cooperation with her black neighbor, Petrus. For a time Lurie finds a sort of peace on the farm as he helps Lucy, though the two have had an uneasy relationship since he and Lucy's mother divorced some years earlier. The fragile peace is shattered, however, when the farm is invaded by three men who at first pretend to need help and then attack Lurie and his daughter, setting him on fire and locking him in the bathroom while they sexually assault Lucy.

The remainder of the novel concerns Lurie and his daughter's attempts to come to terms with what has happened to them. The three attackers were black, and Lucy comes to see the rape as a sort of retribution for historical racial injustice. She is pregnant as a result of the rape and is determined to keep the child. Lurie is horrified by her response, but he too sees the assault in terms of historical inevitability, as the result of a sort of inherited guilt.

In a review of the book for The New York Times (11 November 1999), Christopher Lehmann-Haupt noted that the book reflects the uncertainty of postapartheid South Africa, where "all values are shifting"; he also noted that "The effect of the novel's plot is deeply disturbing, in part because of what happens to David and Lucy, but equally because of the disintegrating context of their experiences." Reviewing the book for the 27 July 1999 Mail & Guardian (Johannesburg), Jane Taylor called the novel "remarkable in its gauging of the contemporary dilemmas arising from our circumstances in a society obsessed by our own violent context." Noting that central to the work is "the failure of the imagination," she pointed out that in this aspect Disgrace is linked to The Lives of Animals: "these two works in conjunction explore the sealing off of imaginative identification that has been a necessary precondition for us to engage in the long-term and sustained business of slaughter."

Writing in The New Republic (20 December 1999), James Wood argued that "a significant weakness" in the novel is the "formal parallel of disgrace": as a result of what happened to Lucy, and her reaction to it, Lurie comes to accept the necessity of being penitent for his actions, but the "formal parallel" equates his disgrace with Lucy, and hers is, Wood argues, "not one that she earned or deserved." Wood also noted that the "rather shocking notion of rape as historical reparation. . . . has earned Coetzee a certain amount of covert condemnation." Disgrace was generally critically well received, however, and earned Coetzee a second Booker-McConell Prize--he thus became the only novelist in the thirty-one-year history of the award to win twice.

(Marais, cite DLB article!!).

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Disgrace, Coetzee's next novel, is a strong statement on the political climate in post-apartheid South Africa. The main character, David Lurie, is an English professor at University of Cape Town. He sees himself as an aging, but still handsome, Lothario. He has seduced many young women in his day, but an affair with one of his students finally proves his undoing. Charged with sexual harassment, he leaves his post in disgrace, seeking refuge at the small farm owned by his daughter, Lucy. Lucy and David are anything but alike. While his world is refined and highly intellectualized, Lucy works at hard physical labor in simple surroundings. David has allowed his sexual desires to lead him, while Lucy is living a life of voluntary celibacy. While David was in an elitist position, Lucy works alongside her black neighbors. David's notions of orderliness are overturned when three men come to the farm, set him afire, and rape Lucy. Father and daughter survive the ordeal, only to learn that Lucy has become pregnant. Eventually, in order to protect herself and her simple way of life, she consents to become the third wife in her neighbor's polygamous family, even though he may have arranged the attack on her in order to gain control of her property.

The complex story of Disgrace drew praise from critics. "The novel's many literary allusions are remarkably cohesive on the subject of spiritual alienation: Lucifer, Cain, the tragedy of birth in Wordsworth--there is a full and even fulsome repertoire of soullessness," remarked Sarah Ruden in Christian Century. "The same theme can be found in many modernist and postmodernist writers, but Coetzee cancels the usual pretentious and self-pitying overtones." Antioch Review contributor John Kennedy noted, "In its honest and relentless probing of character and motive . . . this novel secures Coetzee's place among today's major novelists. . . . The impulses and crimes of passion, the inadequacies of justice, and the rare possibilities for redemption are played out on many levels in this brilliantly crafted book." The author's deft handling of the ambiguities of his story was also praised by Rebecca Saunders, who in Review of Contemporary Fiction warned that Disgrace is "not for the ethically faint of heart." Saunders felt Coetzee has "strewn nettles in the bed of the comfortable social conscience," and his book is written in the style "we have come to expect" from him, "at once taciturn and blurting out the unspeakable."

“J(ohn) M(axwell) Coetzee, 1940- .” 2 Oct. 2003.  Contemporary Authors Online.  Gale, 2003.  Gale Literature Resource Center [Online Subscription Database]. The Gale Group, 2004. Central Oregon Community College Library, Bend, OR. 17 August 2004.

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Old Bibliography

Attridge, Derek. J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading: Literature in the Event. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2004.

LC Call No. PR9369.3.C58 Z53 2004 -  available to COCC students from Summit

Attridge, Derek. "J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace: Introduction." Editorial. [Special Issue devoted to Disgrace, by J. M. Coetzee.]  Interventions: The International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 4.3 (Nov. 2002): 315-320.

Full text in .pdf format available to COCC students from EBSCO Academic Search Premier online subscription database

Attridge, Derek. "Literary Form and the Demands of Politics: Otherness in J. M. Coetzee's Age of Iron."  Aesthetics and Ideology. Ed. George Levine. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1994. 243-263.

Attridge, Derek. "Trusting the Other: Ethics and Politics in J. M. Coetzee's Age of Iron." South Atlantic Quarterly, 93.1 (1994): 59-82.

Attwell, David. "The Problem of History in the Fiction of J. M. Coetzee." Rendering Things Visible: Essays on South African Literary Culture of the 1970s and 1980s. Ed. Martin Trump. Johannesburg: Ravan, 1990. 94-133.

Attwell, David. "Race in Disgrace." [Special Issue devoted to Disgrace, by J. M. Coetzee.]  Interventions: The International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 4.3 (Nov. 2002): 331-341.

Full text in .pdf format available to COCC students from EBSCO Academic Search Premier online subscription database

Banville, John. "Being and Nothingness." Rev. of Elizabeth Costello, by J. M. Coetzee. Nation 3 Nov. 2003: 30-33 (4pp). Academic Search Premier (11125301). EBSCOhost. Central Oregon Community College Library, Bend, OR. 6 Sep. 2004.

EBSCO Academic Search Premier subscription database articles are available online to COCC students.

Barnard, Rita. "Coetzee's Country Ways." [Special Issue devoted to Disgrace, by J. M. Coetzee.]  Interventions: The International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 4.3 (Nov. 2002): 384-394.

Full text in .pdf format available to COCC students from EBSCO Academic Search Premier online subscription database

Barnard, Rita. "J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace and the South African Pastoral." Contemporary Literature: 44.2 (Summer 2003): 199-224.

Full text in .pdf format available to COCC students from EBSCO Academic Search Premier online subscription database

Barney, Richard A. "Between Swift and Kafka." J. M. Coetzee Special Section. World Literature Today 78.1 (Jan.-April 2004): 17-23 (7pp). Academic Search Premier (11810873). EBSCOhost. Central Oregon Community College Library, Bend, OR. 6 Sep. 2004.

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Barzun, Jacques. "Byron and the Byronic." Atlantic Monthly August 1953.  The Atlantic Online. 2004. 1 Sept. 2004 <http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/53aug/barzun.htm>. 

Bishop, G. Scott. "J. M. Coetzee's Foe: A Culmination and a Solution to a Problem of White Identity." World Literature Today 64.1 (Winter 1990): 54-57.

Full text available to COCC students from Gale Literature Resource Center online subscription database.

Blyn, Sara. "Apartheid Literature." Fall 2001. Post Colonial Studies at Emory. Ed. Deepika Bahri (Dept. of English, Emory Univ., Atlanta, GA). 4 Sep. 2004 <http://www.emory.edu/ENGLISH/Bahri/apartlit.html>.

Boehmer, Elleke. "Not Saying Sorry, Not Speaking Pain: Gender Implications in Disgrace." [Special Issue devoted to Disgrace, by J. M. Coetzee.]  Interventions: The International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 4.3 (Nov. 2002): 342-351.

Full text in .pdf format available to COCC students from EBSCO Academic Search Premier online subscription database

Brink, André P. "Writing against Big Brother: Notes on Apocalyptic Fiction in South Africa." World Literature Today 58.2 (1984): 189-194.

Byrne, Deirdre C. "Science Fiction in South Africa." Correspondents Abroad. PMLA 119.3 (May 2004): 522-529.

Carusi, Annamaria. "Foe: The Narrative and Power." Journal of Literary Studies 5.2 (1989): 134-144. 

Castillo, Debra A. "The Composition of the Self in Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians." Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction 27.2 (Winter 1986): 78-90. 

Chapman, Michael. "The Writing of Politics and the Politics of Writing: On Reading Dovey on Reading Lacan on Reading Coetzee on Reading . . . (?)." Journal of Literary Studies 4.3 (1988): 327-341.

Clark, David Draper. Editor's Note: J. M. Coetzee Special Section. World Literature Today 78.1 (Jan.-April 2004): 3-5 (3pp). Academic Search Premier (11810867). EBSCOhost. Central Oregon Community College Library, Bend, OR. 6 Sep. 2004.

EBSCO Academic Search Premier subscription database articles are available online to COCC students.

Clayton, Cherry. "Uprooting the Malignant Fictions." Rev. of White Writing, by J. M. Coetzee; and Hopes and Impediments, by Chinua Achebe. The Times Literary Supplement [No. 4460] 23 September 1988: 1043.

Coetzee, J. M. "Excerpts from Disgrace." [Pages 111-112 and 183-184.] "J. M. Coetzee - Prose." 6 Nov. 2003. Nobel e-Museum. Nobel Foundation, 2004. 4 Sep. 2004 <http://www.nobel.se/literature/laureates/2003/coetzee-prose.html>.

Coetzee, J. M. "Fever and Flame." [Excerpt from Youth.] American Scholar 71.3 (Summer 2002): 17 (9pp.) Academic Search Premier (7254252). EBSCOhost. Central Oregon Community College Library, Bend, OR. 6 Sep. 2004.

EBSCO Academic Search Premier subscription database articles are available online to COCC students.

Coetzee, J. M. "He and His Man." Nobel Lecture 2003. PMLA 119.3 (May 2004): 547-552.

Coetzee, J. M. "How I Learned about America - and Africa - in Texas." J. M. Coetzee Special Section. World Literature Today 78.1 (Jan.-April 2004): 6-7 (2pp). Academic Search Premier (11810868). EBSCOhost. Central Oregon Community College Library, Bend, OR. 6 Sep. 2004.

EBSCO Academic Search Premier subscription database articles are available online to COCC students.
 Abstract: Account by Coetzee about when he was a graduate student at the University of Texas, Austin in the 1960s. First published in the New York Times, April 15, 1984:
http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/11/02/home/coetzee-learned.html

Cooper, Rand Richards. "Portrait of the Writer as an Afrikaner." Rev. of Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life, by J. M. Coetzee. New York Times 2 Nov. 1997. New York Times on the Web. 1997. 31 Aug. 2004 <http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/11/02/reviews/971102.02coopert.html>.

Cornwell, Gareth. "Realism, Rape, and J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace." Critique 43.4 (June 2002): 307 (16pp).  Academic Search Premier (7254252). EBSCOhost. Central Oregon Community College Library, Bend, OR. 6 Sep. 2004.

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Cowley, Jason. "Despite a Booker Nomination and a Nobel Prize, These Writers, Unheard in Their Own Land, Feel Oppressed by Emptiness." New Statesman 13 Oct. 2003: 22 (3pp). Academic Search Premier (11030849). EBSCOhost. Central Oregon Community College Library, Bend, OR. 6 Sep. 2004.

EBSCO Academic Search Premier subscription database articles are available online to COCC students.

Cowley, Jason. "J. M. Coetzee: The Ideal Chronicler of the New South Africa, He Deserves to make Literary History as a Double Booker Winner." New Statesman 25 Oct. 1999:18 (3pp). Academic Search Premier (2436548). EBSCOhost. Central Oregon Community College Library, Bend, OR. 6 Sep. 2004.

EBSCO Academic Search Premier subscription database articles are available online to COCC students.

de Graef, Ortwin. "Suffering, Sympathy, Circulation: Smith, Wordsworth, Coetzee (But There's a Dog)." European Journal of English Studies 7.3 (2003): 311-331.

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De Kock, Leon. "Literature, Politics and Universalism: A Debate between Es'kia Mphahlele and J. M. Coetzee." Journal of Literary Studies 3.4 (1987): 35-48.

Diala, Isidore. "Nadine Gordimer, J. M. Coetzee, and Andre Brink: Guilt, Expiation, and the Reconciliation Process in Post-Apartheid South Africa." Journal of Modern Literature 25.2 (Winter 2001/2002): 50-68.

Full text in .pdf format available to COCC students from EBSCO Academic Search Premier online subscription database

Dodd, Josephine. "Naming and Framing: Naturalization and Colonization in J. M. Coetzee's In the Heart of the Country." World Literature Written in English 27.2 (Autumn 1987): 153-61.

Dovey, Teresa. "Coetzee and His Critics: The Case of Dusklands." English in Africa 14.2 (1987): 15-30.

Dovey, Teresa. "The Intersection of Postmodern, Postcolonial and Feminist Discourse in J. M. Coetzee's Foe." Journal of Literary Studies 5.2 (1989): 119-133.

Dovey, Teresa. The Novels of J.M. Coetzee: Lacanian Allegories. Cape Town and Johannesburg, South Africa: Donker, 1988.

LC Call No. PR9369.3.C58 Z75 1988 - available to COCC students from Summit

Du Plessis, Michael. "Bodies and Signs: Inscriptions of Femininity in John Coetzee and Wilma Stockenström." Journal of Literary Studies 4.1 (1988): 118-128.

Durrant, Sam. "Bearing Witness to Apartheid: J. M. Coetzee's Inconsolable Works of Mourning." Contemporary Literature 40.3 (Fall 1999): 430 (34pp). Academic Search Premier (2373151). EBSCOhost. Central Oregon Community College Library, Bend, OR. 6 Sep. 2004.

EBSCO Academic Search Premier subscription database articles are available online to COCC students.

Durrant, Sam. Postcolonial Narrative and the Work of Mourning: J. M. Coetzee, Wilson Harris, and Toni Morrison. Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 2004.

LC Call No. PR9369.3.C58 Z65 2004 -available from Summit

Eckstein, Barbara. "The Body, the Word, and the State: J. M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians." Novel 22.2 (1989): 175-198.

Farrad, Grant. "The Mundanacity of Violence: Living in a State of Disgrace." [Special Issue devoted to Disgrace, by J. M. Coetzee.]  Interventions: The International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 4.3 (Nov. 2002): 3.

Full text in .pdf format available to COCC students from EBSCO Academic Search Premier online subscription database

"Featured Author: J. M. Coetzee, with News and Reviews from the Archives of The New York Times." New York Times on the Web, 1999. 31 Aug. 2004 <http://www.nytimes.com/books/99/11/28/specials/coetzee.html>.

Fitzgerald, Michael. "Serendipity." J. M. Coetzee Special Section. World Literature Today 78.1 (Jan.-April 2004): 24-25 (2pp). Academic Search Premier (11810874). EBSCOhost. Central Oregon Community College Library, Bend, OR. 6 Sep. 2004.

EBSCO Academic Search Premier subscription database articles are available online to COCC students.

Fraser, David. Rev. of The Lives of Animals, by J. M. Coetzee. Quarterly Review of Biology 76.2 (June 2001): 215 (2pp). Academic Search Premier (4647139). EBSCOhost. Central Oregon Community College Library, Bend, OR. 6 Sep. 2004.

EBSCO Academic Search Premier subscription database articles are available online to COCC students.

Gallagher, Susan VanZanten. A Story of South Africa: J. M. Coetzee's Fiction in Context. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1991.

LC Call No. PR9369.3.C58 Z66 1991 - available from Summit

Gallagher, Susan Van Zanten. "Torture and the Novel: J. M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians." Contemporary Literature 29.2 (Summer 1988): 277-85.

Gardiner, Allan. "J. M. Coetzee's Dusklands: Colonial Encounters of the Robinsonian Kind." World Literature Written in English 27.2 (Autumn 1987): 174-84.

Gillmer, Joan. "The Motif of the Damaged Child in the Work of J. M. Coetzee." Momentum: On Recent South African Writing. Ed. M. J. Daymond, J. U. Jacobs, and Margaret Lenta. Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press and London: Currey, 1984. 107-120.

Glenn-Lauga, Catherine. "The Hearerly Text: Sea Shells on the Sea Shore." Journal of Literary Studies 5.2 (1989): 194-214.

Gorra, Michael. "After the Fall." Rev. of Disgrace, by J. M. Coetzee. New York Times 28 Nov. 1999. New York Times on the Web, 1999. 31 Aug. 2004 <http://www.nytimes.com/books/99/11/28/reviews/991128.28gorrat.html>.

COCC Library holds periodical subscription to The New York Times.

Graham, Lucy Valerie. "Reading the Unspeakable: Rape in J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace." Journal of Southern African Studies 29.2 (June 2003): 433-444.

Full text in .pdf format available to COCC students from EBSCO Academic Search Premier online subscription database

Gunnars, Kristjana, and Abdulrazak Gurnah. "A Writer's Writer: Two Perspectives." J. M. Coetzee Special Section. World Literature Today 78.1 (Jan.-April 2004): 11-13 (3pp). Academic Search Premier (11810871). EBSCOhost. Central Oregon Community College Library, Bend, OR. 6 Sep. 2004.

EBSCO Academic Search Premier subscription database articles are available online to COCC students.

Head, Dominic. J.M. Coetzee. Cambridge Studies in African and Caribbean Literature. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1997.

LC Call No. PR9369.3.C58 Z68 1997 - available from Summit

Hewson, Kelly. "Making the `Revolutionary Gesture': Nadine Gordimer, J. M. Coetzee and Some Variations on the Writer's Responsibility." Ariel: A Review of International English Literature 19.4 (October 1988): 55-72.

Holland, Michael. "'Plink-Plunk': Unforgetting the Present in Coetzee's Disgrace." [Special Issue devoted to Disgrace, by J. M. Coetzee.]  Interventions: The International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 4.3 (Nov. 2002): 395-404.

Full text in .pdf format available to COCC students from EBSCO Academic Search Premier online subscription database

Hook, Derek. Rev. of Stranger Shores: Essays 1986-1999, by J. M. Coetzee. Theoria: A Journal of Social and Political Theory April 2004: 143-145.

Full text in .pdf format available to COCC students from EBSCO Academic Search Premier online subscription database

Huggan, Graham, and Stephen Watson, ed. Critical Perspectives on J.M. Coetzee. New York : St. Martin's Press, 1996.

LC Call No. PR9369.3.C58 Z638 1996 - available from Summit

"J. M. Coetzee (1940- )." The Authors. Guardian Unlimited Books [Manchester, UK], Guardian Newspapers, 2004. 31 Aug. 2004 <http://books.guardian.co.uk/authors/author/0,5917,-43,00.html>.

Page offers links to several review articles, as well as excerpts from Coetzee's works:
"JM Coetzee's Nobel Lecture: 'He and His Man'":
 http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/generalfiction/story/0,6000,1103195,00.html
"Lost in London," Excerpt from Youth: Scenes from Provincial Life II (memoir):
 http://books.guardian.co.uk/extracts/story/0,6761,1059934,00.html
"'That Is Not Where I Come From,'" Excerpt from Elizabeth Costello (novel):
 http://books.guardian.co.uk/extracts/story/0,6761,1055012,00.html
"The Reluctant Guest of Honour," Excerpt from Elizabeth Costello (novel):
 http://books.guardian.co.uk/extracts/story/0,6761,1027772,00.html

"J. M. Coetzee: Banquet Speech." 10 Dec. 2003. Nobel e-Museum. Nobel Foundation, 2003. 4 Sep. 2004 <http://www.nobel.se/literature/laureates/2003/coetzee-speech-e.html>.

“J(ohn) M(axwell) Coetzee, 1940- .” 2 Oct. 2003.  Contemporary Authors Online.  Gale, 2003.  Gale Literature Resource Center [Online Subscription Database]. The Gale Group, 2004. Central Oregon Community College Library, Bend, OR. 17 August 2004.

Gale Literature Resource Center subscription database articles are available online to COCC students.

Jacobson, Warren. "The Booker Prize." Fall 1997 [sic]. Post Colonial Studies at Emory. Ed. Deepika Bahri (Dept. of English, Emory Univ., Atlanta, GA). 4 Sep. 2004 <http://www.emory.edu/ENGLISH/Bahri/Booker.html>.

Jolly, Rosemary Jane. Colonization, Violence, and Narration in White South African Writing: Andre Brink, Breyten Breytenbach, and J. M. Coetzee. Athens, OH: Ohio Univ. Press, 1996.

Knox-Shaw, Peter. "Dusklands: A Metaphysics of Violence." Commonwealth Novel in English 2.1 (1983): 65-81.

Kossew, Sue. "The Anxiety of Authorship: J. M. Coetzee's The Master of Petersburg (1994) and André Brink's On the Contrary (1993)." English in Africa 23.1 (1986): 67-88.

Kossew, Sue. Pen and Power: A Post-Colonial Reading of J.M. Coetzee and André Brink. Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 1996.

Kossew, Sue. "The Politics of Shame and Redemption in J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace." Research in African Literatures 34.2 (Summer 2003): 155-162.

Full text in .pdf format available to COCC students from EBSCO Academic Search Premier online subscription database

Kossew, Sue, ed. Critical Essays on J. M. Coetzee. Critical Essays on World Literature. New York: G. K. Hall, 1998.

Call No. PR9369.3.C58 Z637 1998 -  available to COCC students from Summit

Lee, Hermione. "The Rest Is Silence." Rev. of Elizabeth Costello, by J. M. Coetzee. Guardian [Manchester, UK] 30 Aug. 2003. Guardian Unlimited Books, Guardian Newspapers, 2004. 31 Aug. 2004 <http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/generalfiction/0,6121,1031735,00.html>.

Kurtz, J. Roger. Rev. of Stranger Shores: Literary Essays 1886-1999, by J. M. Coetzee. World Literature Today 76.2 (Spring 2002): 249. Academic Search Premier (6991882). EBSCOhost. Central Oregon Community College Library, Bend, OR. 6 Sep. 2004.

EBSCO Academic Search Premier subscription database articles are available online to COCC students.

Lehmann-Haupt, Christopher. "Caught in Shifting Values (and Plot)." Rev. of Disgrace, by J. M. Coetzee. Books of the Times. New York Times 11 Nov. 1999. New York Times on the Web, 1999. 31 Aug. 2004 <http://www.nytimes.com/books/99/11/07/daily/111199disgrace-book-review.html>.

Lenta, Margaret. "Autrebiography: J. M. Coetzee's Boyhood and Youth." English in Africa 30.1 (May 2003): 157-169.

Full text in .pdf format available to COCC students from EBSCO Academic Search Premier online subscription database

Lenta, Margaret. "Fictions of the Future." English Academy Review 5 (1988): 133-145.

Lyall, Sarah. "J. M. Coetzee's 'Disgrace' Wins Booker Prize." New York Times 26 Oct. 1999. New York Times on the Web, 1999. 31 Aug. 2004 <http://www.nytimes.com/library/books/10269coetzee-booker.html>.

Maes-Jelinek, Hena. "Ambivalent Clio: J. M. Coetzee's In the Heart of the Country and Wilson Harris's Carnival." Journal of Commonwealth Literature 22.1 (1987): 87-98.

Malan, Rian. "Only the Big Questions." Time 13 Oct. 2003: 80 (1p). Academic Search Premier (10996073). EBSCOhost. Central Oregon Community College Library, Bend, OR. 6 Sep. 2004.

EBSCO Academic Search Premier subscription database articles are available online to COCC students.

Marais, Michael.  “J. M. Coetzee, February 9, 1940- .”  Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 225: South African Writers.  Ed. Paul A. Scanlon.  Detroit: Gale Group, 2000. 131-149. Gale Literature Resource Center [Online Subscription Database]. The Gale Group, 2004. Central Oregon Community College Library, Bend, OR. 17 August 2004. 

Marais, Michael. "Languages of Power: A Story of Reading Michael K/Michael K." English in Africa 16.2 (1989): 31-48.

Marais, Michael. "Places of Pigs: The Tension between Implication and Transcendence in J. M. Coetzee's Age of Iron and The Master of Petersburg." Journal of Commonwealth Literature 31.1 (1996): 83-96.

Martin, Richard G. "Narrative, History, Ideology: A Study of Waiting for the Barbarians and Burger's Daughter." Ariel: A Review of International English Literature 17.3 (July 1986): 3-21.

The Man Booker Prize 2004 [official web site]. 31 Aug. 2004 <http://www.manbookerprize.co.uk/>.

   "The Booker Prize for Fiction was originally set up by Booker plc in 1969 to reward merit, raise the stature of the author in the eyes of the public and encourage an interest in contemporary quality fiction. In April 2002, it was announced that the Man Group had been chosen by the Booker Prize Foundation as the new sponsor of the Booker Prize. The sponsorship will run until 2006 during which time the prize will be known as the Man Booker Prize."
   "The Man Booker International Prize is unique in the world of literature in that it can be won by an author of any nationality, providing that his or her work is available in the English language. It will be awarded every second year. An author can only win the award once."
Source: The Man Booker International Prize 2005 [official web site]. 31 Aug. 2004 <http://www.manbookerinternational.com/intro.html>.

Masoga, Mogomme Alpheus. "Towards Sacrificial-Cleansing Ritual in South Africa: An Indigenous African View of Truth and Reconciliation." Alternation: International Journal for the Study of Southern African Literature and Languages 6.1 (1999). 4 Sep. 2004 <http://sing.reshma.tripod.com/alternation/alternation6_1/14MASOG.htm>.

McCrum, Robert. "The Voice of Africa: Robert McCrum on Nobel Prize-winner JM Coetzee's Timeless Brilliance." The Observer 5 Oct. 2003. Guardian Unlimited Books [Manchester, UK], Guardian Newspapers, 2004. 31 Aug. 2004 <http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/generalfiction/story/0,6000,1055828,00.html>.

McDonald, Peter D. "Disgrace Effects." [Special Issue devoted to Disgrace, by J. M. Coetzee.]  Interventions: The International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 4.3 (Nov. 2002): 321-330.

Full text in .pdf format available to COCC students from EBSCO Academic Search Premier online subscription database

Middlemiss, Perry. "1999 Booker Prize." Perry Middlemiss, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia; 2002. 31 Aug. 2004 <http://www.middlemiss.org/lit/prizes/booker/booker1999.html>.

Moore, John Rees. "Coetzee and the Precarious Lives of People and Animals." Rev. of Disgrace and The Lives of Animals, by J. M. Coetzee. Sewanee Review 109.3 (Summer 2001): 462-474.

Full text in .pdf format available to COCC students from EBSCO Academic Search Premier online subscription database

Moore, John Rees. "J. M. Coetzee and Foe." The Sewanee Review 98.1 (Winter 1990): 152-59. Olsen, Lance. "The Presence of Absence: Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians." Ariel: A Review of International English Literature 16.2 (April 1985): 47-56.

Morphet, Tony. "Reading Coetzee in South Africa." J. M. Coetzee Special Section. World Literature Today 78.1 (Jan.-April 2004): 14-16 (3pp). Academic Search Premier (11810872). EBSCOhost. Central Oregon Community College Library, Bend, OR. 6 Sep. 2004.

EBSCO Academic Search Premier subscription database articles are available online to COCC students.

Morphet, Tony. "Two Interviews with J. M. Coetzee, 1983 and 1987." TriQuarterly 69 (Spring/Summer 1987): 454-464.

Moses, Michael Valdez.  "Solitary Walkers: Rousseau and Coetzee's Life and Times of Michael K." South Atlantic Quarterly 93.1 (1994): 131-156.

Moses, Michael Valdez, ed. The Writings of J. M. Coetzee. Special ed. of The South Atlantic Quarterly '93 [Winter 1994].

“The Nobel Prize in Literature: John Maxwell Coetzee.”  Press Release, 2 Oct. 2003.  The Permanent Secretary, Swedish Academy. Nobel e-Museum. Nobel Foundation, 2004. 21 August 2004 <http://www.nobel.se/literature/laureates/2003/press.html>.

Noguchi, Mai. "Apartheid." Fall 2000. Post Colonial Studies at Emory. Ed. Deepika Bahri (Dept. of English, Emory Univ., Atlanta, GA). 4 Sep. 2004 <http://www.emory.edu/ENGLISH/Bahri/apart.html>.

Olsen, Lance. "The Presence of Absence: Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians." Ariel 16.2 (1985): 47-56.

Pechey, Graham. "Coetzee's Purgatorial Africa: The Case of Disgrace." Editorial. [Special Issue devoted to Disgrace, by J. M. Coetzee.]  Interventions: The International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 4.3 (Nov. 2002): 374-383.

Full text in .pdf format available to COCC students from EBSCO Academic Search Premier online subscription database

Penner, [Dick] Allen Richard. Countries of the Mind: The Fiction of J.M. Coetzee. New York and Westport, CN: Greenwood Press, 1989.

Call No. PR9369.3.C58 Z87 1989 -  available from Summit

Penner, Dick. "J. M. Coetzee's Foe: The Muse, the Absurd, and the Colonial Dilemma." World Literature Written in English 27.2 (Autumn 1987): 207-15.

Penner, Dick. "Sight, Blindness and Double-thought in J. M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians." World Literature Written in English 26.1 (Spring 1986): 34-45.

Post, Robert M. "Oppression in the Fiction of J. M. Coetzee." Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction 27.2 (Winter 1986): 67-77.

Post, Robert M.. "The Noise of Freedom: J. M. Coetzee's Foe." Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 30.3 (Spring 1989): 143-54.

Price, Jonathan. "J. M. Coetzee." Fall 2000. Post Colonial Studies at Emory. Ed. Deepika Bahri (Dept. of English, Emory Univ., Atlanta, GA). 4 Sep. 2004 <http://www.emory.edu/ENGLISH/Bahri/Coetzee.html>.

Regan, Tom, and Martin Rowe. "Animal Rights: What the Nobel Committee Failed to Note." International Herald Tribune 19 Dec. 2003. Common Dreams NewsCenter, 1997-2004. 5 Sep. 2004 <http://www.commondreams.org/views03/1219-11.htm>.

Renders, Luc. "J. M. Coetzee's Michael K: Starving in a Land of Plenty." Literary Gastronomy. Ed. David Bevan. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1988. 95-102.

Rhedin, Folke. "Interview [with J. M. Coetzee]." Kunapipi 6.1 (1984): 6-11.

Rich, Paul. "Apartheid and the Decline of Civilization Idea: An Essay on Nadine Gordimer's July's People and J. M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians." Research in African Literatures 15 (1984): 365-393.

Rich, Paul. "Tradition and Revolt in South African Fiction: The Novels of André Brink, Nadine Gordimer and J. M. Coetzee." Journal of Southern African Studies 9.1 (1982): 54-73.

Roberts, Sheila. "Cinderella's Mothers: J. M. Coetzee's In the Heart of the Country." English in Africa 19.1 (1992): 21-33.

Sanders, Mark. "Disgrace." [Special Issue devoted to Disgrace, by J. M. Coetzee.]  Interventions: The International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 4.3 (Nov. 2002): 363-373.

Full text in .pdf format available to COCC students from EBSCO Academic Search Premier online subscription database

Sarvan, Charles. "Disgrace: A Path to Grace?" J. M. Coetzee Special Section. World Literature Today 78.1 (Jan.-April 2004): 26-29 (4pp). Academic Search Premier (11810875). EBSCOhost. Central Oregon Community College Library, Bend, OR. 6 Sep. 2004.

EBSCO Academic Search Premier subscription database articles are available online to COCC students.

Simpson, David. "Neither Rushdie nor Nobody: J. M. Coetzee on Censorship and Offense." Critical Resources. Pretexts: Literary and Cultural Studies 10.1 (July 2001): 119-128.

Full text in .pdf format available to COCC students from EBSCO Academic Search Premier online subscription database

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. "Theory in the Margin: Coetzee's Foe Reading Defoe's Crusoe/Roxana." English in Africa 17.2 (1990): 1-23.

Swedish Academy. "J. M. Coetzee - Bibliography." 3 May 2004. Nobel e-Museum. Nobel Foundation, 2004. 4 Sep. 2004 <http://www.nobel.se/literature/laureates/2003/coetzee-bibl.html>.

Szalai, Jennifer. "Harvest of a Quiet Eye: J. M. Coetzee and the Art of Lucidity." Harper's Magazine July 2004: 85-89.

Taylor, D. J. "The Castaway: DJ Taylor on JM Coetzee's Intriguing Nobel Acceptance Speech." Guardian 13 Dec. 2003. Guardian Unlimited Books [Manchester, UK], Guardian Newspapers, 2004. 4 Sep. 2004 <http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/generalfiction/story/0,6000,1105841,00.html>.

Thornton, Lawrence. "Apartheid's Last Vicious Gasps." Rev. of Age of Iron, by J. M. Coetzee. New York Times 23 Sept. 1990, Late ed.- Final, sec. 7: 7. New York Times on the Web, 1998. 31 Aug. 2004 <http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/11/02/home/coetzee-iron.html>.

Tiffin, H. M. "J. M. Coetzee: Overview." Contemporary Novelists. 6th ed. Ed. Susan Windisch Brown. St. James Press, 1996. Rpt. Gale Literature Resource Center [Online Subscription Database]. The Gale Group, 2004. Central Oregon Community College Library, Bend, OR. 17 August 2004. 

Full text available to COCC students from Gale Literature Resource Center online subscription database.

Vaughan, Michael. "Literature and Politics: Currents in South African Writing in the Seventies." Journal of Southern African Studies 9.1 (1982): 118-138.

Wade, Jean-Philippe. "The Allegorical Text and History: J. M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians."  Journal of Literary Studies 6.4 (1990): 275-288.

Wästberg, Per. “The Nobel Prize in Literature 2003.”  Presentation Speech, Stockholm Concert Hall.  Nobel e-Museum. Nobel Foundation, Swedish Academy. 2003.  August 21 2004 <http://www.nobel.se/literature/laureates/2003/presentation-speech.html>.

Watson, Stephen. "Colonialism and the Novels of J. M. Coetzee." Research in African Literatures 17.3 (Fall 1986): 370-92.

Watson, Stephen. "Speaking: J. M. Coetzee." [Interview] Speak 1.3 (1978): 21-24.

West, Paul. "The Novelist and the Hangman: When Horror Invades Protocol." Harper's Magazine July 2004: 89+.

Williams, Paul. "Foe: The Story of Silence." English Studies in Africa 31.1 (1988): 33-39.

Wood, W. J. B. "Dusklands and 'The Impregnable Stronghold of the Intellect.'" Theoria 54 (May 1980): 13-23.

Wood, W. J. B. "Waiting for the Barbarians: Two Sides of Imperial Rule and Some Related Considerations." Momentum: On Recent South African Writing. Ed. M. J. Daymond, J. U. Jacobs, and Margaret Lenta. Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press and London: Currey, 1984. 129-140.

Yeoh, Gilbert. "J. M. Coetzee and Samuel Beckett: Ethics, Truth Telling, and Self-Deception." Critique 44.4 (Summer 2003): 331-348 (18pp). Academic Search Premier (10853701). EBSCOhost. Central Oregon Community College Library, Bend, OR. 6 Sep. 2004.

EBSCO Academic Search Premier subscription database articles are available online to COCC students.

Zamora, Lois Parkinson. "Allegories of Power in the Fiction of J. M. Coetzee." Journal of Literary Studies 2.1 (1986): 1-14.

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Major Works by J. M. Coetzee

 

1974: Dusklands. [novel]
           First published: Johannesburg, South Africa: Ravan Press, 1974.
          First published in U.S.A.: New York: Penguin   Books, 1985.
          LC Call No. PR9369.3.C58 D8 . . . one + editions available to COCC students through Summit

Description: Dusklands contains two novellas: The Vietnam Project (set in U.S.A.) and The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee (set in South Africa). "The Vietnam Project introduces Eugene Dawn, employed to help the Americans win the Vietnam War through psychological warfare. The assignment eventually costs Dawn his sanity. The title character of The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee, a fictionalized ancestor of the author, is an explorer and conqueror in the 1760s who destroys an entire South African tribe over his perception that the people have humiliated him through their indifference and lack of fear" (“J(ohn) M(axwell) Coetzee, 1940-"). "Geographically separate and at a temporal remove of two centuries, these two novellas initially appear to be completely independent. The title of the combined text, however, by implication classifies both the United States and South Africa as 'dusklands' and thus suggests that they have something in common--a shared history of colonialism" (Marais, “J. M. Coetzee"). The two novellas "are juxtaposed to offer a scarifying account of the fear and paranoia of imperialists and aggressors and the horrifying ways in which dominant regimes, 'empires,' commit violence against 'the other' through repression, torture, and genocide. While Coetzee's work is firmly grounded in the violence and oppression of the South African situation out of which he writes, he regards it as 'only one manifestation of a wider historical situation to do with colonialism, late colonialism, neo-colonialism'" (Tiffin).

1977: In the Heart of the Country. [novel]
           First published in the U.S.A. as From the Heart of the Country, Harper (New York, NY), 1977; and
           in England as In the Heart of the Country, Secker & Warburg (London, England), 1977.
           LC Call No. PR9369.3 .C58 I5  [date] . . . one + editions available to COCC students through Summit

Description: In the Heart of the Country treats racial conflict and mental deterioration. The protagonist is Magda, a white South African spinster, "who lives with her father and their servants Klein-Anna and Hendrik, on a remote and lonely sheep farm somewhere in South Africa, probably the Karoo. The exact geographical location of this setting is not stipulated, and neither is the historical period in which the action occurs--the first of many indeterminacies in this highly ambivalent novel" (Marais, “J. M. Coetzee"). Magda tells the story in diary form, but her reliability as narrator is suspect, and "the novel defies any coherent reconstruction of its plot. So, for example, it is not clear whether Magda, who is jealous of the sexual relationship that her father may or may not have contrived with Klein-Anna, does or does not murder him. In fact, the text undermines all certainty here by providing the reader with two accounts of the putative murder, yet after each account the father reappears later in the story. What follows the purported murder is equally ambivalent: Magda attempts to regain her position of mastery over Hendrik and Klein-Anna but, upon failing, tries to form an egalitarian relationship with them. Hendrik, however, seemingly rapes her and then, together with Anna, deserts the farm" (Marais, “J. M. Coetzee"). "The novel ends with Magda, now alone on the farm, pleading with "sky-creatures" whom she believes are sending her messages" (Marais, “J. M. Coetzee"). "The 'ghostly brown figures of the last people I knew' eventually abandon her. In this world where historical hatred and conflicts are irreconcilable, she cannot escape the polarities enshrined in the system to become "neither master nor slave, neither parent nor child but the bridge between" (Tiffin).
Awards: CNA (Central News Agency) Literary Award and Mofolo-Plomer Literary prize.
Film Adaptation: "A 1985 Franco-Belgian motion-picture adaptation of the novel, Dust, starred Jane Birkin as Magda and Trevor Howard as her father. Marion Hänsel, who directed and wrote the screenplay, won the Silver Lion for Best First Work at the Venice Film Festival" (Marais, “J. M. Coetzee").

1980: Waiting for the Barbarians. [novel]
First published: London: Secker & Warburg, 1980; First published in U.S.A.: New York: Penguin, 1982.
LC Call No.: PR9369.3.C58 W3 1982 - COCC Library holding - 2nd floor
LC Call No. PR9369.3.C58 W3 . . . one + editions available from Summit

Description: Coetzee's third novel, "[s]et in a frontier settlement of state referred to simply as the Third Empire,"  made it "evident that the politics of colonization would constitute a recurrent theme in his fiction" (Marais, “J. M. Coetzee"). "Though the setting of Waiting for the Barbarians is unspecified, the novel can, like the earlier works, be read as a political fable of South Africa. A sympathetic but ineffectual liberal humanist, the narrator [and protagonist known only as the] magistrate governs a frontier settlement at the edges of empire. A well-meaning man, he is nevertheless implicated in 'the system' and is no match for the neo-fascist torturer, Colonel Joll, who persecutes the few pathetic 'barbarians' (actually from a local fishing tribe) the Empire has succeeded in capturing. The barbarians are almost invisible, being largely a product of that nameless fear that haunts all conquering empires. The Empire is threatened from within, not from without, but it projects its paranoia onto the unknown 'other'" (Tiffin). "In the novel, a magistrate attempting to protect the peaceful nomadic people of his district is imprisoned and tortured by the army that arrives at the frontier town to destroy the "barbarians" on behalf of the Empire. The horror of what he has seen and experienced affects the magistrate in inalterable ways, bringing changes in his personality that he cannot understand" (“J(ohn) M(axwell) Coetzee, 1940-"). "The barbarians remain unknown, and neither Joll's brutalities nor the magistrate's feeble attempts at love and restitution can bring them closer" (Tiffin). According to Anthony Burgess, in Waiting for the Barbarians, Coetzee "'with laconic brilliance, articulates one of the basic problems of our time--how to understand . . . [the] mentality behind the brutality and injustice' . . . " (qtd. in “J(ohn) M(axwell) Coetzee, 1940-").
Awards: CNA Literary Award, James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and Geoffrey Faber Award
1983:  Life and Times of Michael K. [novel]
 First published: London: Secker & Warburg, 1983; first published in U.S.A.: New York: Viking, 1984.
LC Call No. PR9369.3.C58 L5 . . . one or more editions available from Summit

Description: While Coetzee's earlier novels are narrated by "those who are implicated in the imperial purpose, most of Life and Times of Michael K is told from the perspective of those it controls. Michael K attempts, in this highly political novel, to live outside politics and history. As is clear in Coetzee's earlier work, the 'real heroes' are those who attempt to escape history, not those who connive in its making. Formerly a gardener in Cape Town, Michael K attempts to return his dying mother by makeshift cart to the farm of her childhood. She dies during the journey, but her son continues to the destination with her ashes. Here he is insulated from the civil and military terror that are both cause and effect of the breakdown of social order. In complete isolation he is able to discover the joys of cultivation. Though his desert produce barely allows him to subsist it offers a thoroughly magnificent apprehension of life and living. Predictably his painful desert idyll is terminated when he is captured and incarcerated as a guerrilla, but his sense of that one 'tip of vivid green,' the potential of life outside a corrupt society and even outside the casual and violent compassion of other fringe dwellers remains with him to the end" (Tiffin). Awards: CNA Literary Award, Booker-McConnell Prize, and Prix Femina Etranger
1987: Jerusalem Prize for the Freedom of the Individual in Society for Life & Times of Michael K.
In his acceptance speech, Coetzee "remarked on the manner in which the South African state's structures of power have created 'deformed and stunted relations between human beings' and on the extent to which literary representations of life in this country 'no matter how intense . . . suffer from the same stuntedness and deformity.' He then commented that South African literature 'is a literature of bondage. . . . a less than fully human literature'" (Marais, “J. M. Coetzee").

1986: A Land Apart: A South African Reader. Ed. André Brink and J. M. Coetzee.
         Boston: Faber and Faber, 1986. New York: Viking, 1987.
         One + editions available to COCC students from Summit

1987: Foe. [novel]
         New York: Viking, 1987. New York: Penguin, 1987.
            LC Call no.: PR9369.3.C58 F6 1987b - COCC Library holding, 2nd floor
            LC Call no. PR9369.3.C58 F6 [date]. . . one +  editions available from Summit

Description: "In his next novel, Foe (1986), Coetzee departed altogether from the South African geopolitical context. The first section of the novel is set on a deserted island and constitutes a retelling of Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719) by Susan Barton, the castaway narrator of Foe" (Marais, “J. M. Coetzee"). "Susan Barton is shipwrecked on an island inhabited by 'Cruso' and Friday, who labor at constructing barren terraces. Friday is mute, having had his tongue cut out, possibly by slavers, possibly by Cruso himself" (Tiffin). The first section "deals with her stay on the island and focuses primarily on the relationship of Cruso (Coetzee's spelling) with Friday" (Marais, “J. M. Coetzee"). "They are 'rescued' from the island but Cruso dies on the voyage to England. On their arrival in London, Susan and Friday become 'characters in search of an author,' thus beginning their association with the elusive "Foe" and the novel's continuing complex exploration of authorship, writing, and betrayal, themes Coetzee takes up again in The Master of Petersburg" (Tiffin). "In the second section the island is replaced by Defoe's house in England and the focus falls on Susan Barton's relationship with Friday" (Marais, “J. M. Coetzee"). Foe "is also an inquiry into white liberal humanism and into the problem of white representations of the black majority; of the difficulty for South African blacks of finding 'a voice,' a way of speaking within the political and textual constraints that render them, like Friday, mute" (Tiffin). "Given his fascination with the colonization process, it is not surprising that so many of Coetzee's novels reenact the Robinson Crusoe paradigm with its classic encounter between colonizer and colonized and the dialectic of self and other that informs this relationship. After all, Robinson Crusoe, as a literary reflection of the expansive imperialist thrust of Europeans that started in the seventeenth century, has over the centuries gained the status of a folktale of white empire. One could even go as far as to say that this fable forms a paradigm of the conventional Western mode of thinking about the cultural other. This reason seems to be behind Coetzee's decision to rework Defoe's novel [Robinson Crusoe], for which he wrote the introduction to the 1999 Oxford World's Classics edition" (Marais, “J. M. Coetzee"). In a 1987 interview with Tony Morphet "on whether Foe could be seen as 'a retreat from the South African situation," Coetzee responded: "'"Foe is a retreat from the South African situation in a narrow temporal perspective. It is not a retreat from the subject of colonialism or from questions of power'" (qtd. in Marais, “J. M. Coetzee").

1988: White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa. [nonfiction; literary criticism]
New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1988.
LC Call No.: PR 9358.2.W45 C64 1988 - COCC Library holding - 2nd floor
LC Call No. PR 9358.2.W45 C64  . . . one or more editions available from Summit

Description: White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa is a collection of Coetzee's "critical reflections on the mixed fortunes of 'white writing' in South Africa, 'a body of writing [not] different in nature from black writing,' but 'generated by the concerns of people no longer European, yet not African,' Shaun Irlam observed in MLN. The seven essays included in the book discuss writings from the late seventeenth century to the present, through which Coetzee examines the foundations of modern South African writers' attitudes. Irlam described the strength of White Writing as its ability 'to interrogate succinctly and lucidly the presuppositions inhabiting the language with which "white writers" have addressed and presumed to ventriloquize Africa" (qtd. in “J(ohn) M(axwell) Coetzee, 1940-”).

 

1990: Age of Iron. [novel] New York: Random House, 1990.

LC Call No. PR9369.3.C58 A7 [date] . . .  - one or more editions available from Summit

Award: Sunday Express Book of the Year Prize, 1990, for Age of Iron

------------------

TIFFIN:

In Age of Iron, Coetzee's more cryptic address to the repressive South African politics in his earlier works is made overt in the South African setting. The white liberal protagonist, Mrs Curren, is dying of cancer, a disease as much of the apartheid South African State as of herself. The role of representation in the creation and perpetuation of such regimes is again a major issue, but this time it is the South African media (rather than the ur-text of imperialism) that is the violent instrument of "disinformation." The television's presentation of South Africa as "a land of smiling [white] neighbours" contrasts violently with the world of Mrs Curren's black "housegirl," Florence, and with the life (and death) Mrs Curren is forced to witness in Guguletu township. Mrs Curren admits to herself (and to her daughter in the United States to whom the letters that compose the novel are addressed) her complicity in the maintenance of this regime. But through her "witness" in the township and her increasingly close relationship with the vagrant Vercueil, she attempts to fight free of the constraints of her whiteness, eventually embracing her own death as the only apparent solution. Apartheid South Africa has, tragically, produced "children of iron" both white and black, and relationships between children and parents are of major concern.

 

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In Age of Iron Coetzee addresses the crisis of South Africa in direct, rather than allegorical, form. The story of Mrs. Curren, a retired professor dying of cancer and attempting to deal with the realities of apartheid in Cape Town, Age of Iron is "an unrelenting yet gorgeously written parable of modern South Africa, . . . a story filled with foreboding and violence about a land where even the ability of children to love is too great a luxury," Michael Dorris wrote in Chicago Tribune Books. As her disease and the chaos of her homeland progress, Mrs. Curren feels the effects her society has had on its black members; her realization that "now my eyes are open and I can never close them again" forms the basis for her growing rage against the system. After her housekeeper's son and his friend are murdered in her home, Mrs. Curren runs away and hides beneath an overpass, leaving her vulnerable to attack by a gang. She is rescued by Vercueil, a street person she has gradually allowed into her house and her life, who returns her to her home and tends to her needs as the cancer continues its destruction. The book takes the form of a letter from Mrs. Curren to her daughter, living in the United States because she cannot tolerate apartheid. "Dying is traditionally a process of withdrawal from the world," Sean French commented in New Statesman and Society. "Coetzee tellingly reverses this and it is in her last weeks that [Mrs. Curren] first truly goes out in the baffling society she has lived in." As her life ends, Mrs. Curren's urgency to correct the wrongs she never before questioned intensifies. "In this chronicle of an aged white woman coming to understand, and of the unavoidable claims of her country's black youth, Mr. Coetzee has created a superbly realized novel whose truths cut to the bone," Lawrence Thornton wrote in the New York Times Book Review.

“J(ohn) M(axwell) Coetzee, 1940- .” 2 Oct. 2003.  Contemporary Authors Online.  Gale, 2003.  Gale Literature Resource Center [Online Subscription Database]. The Gale Group, 2004. Central Oregon Community College Library, Bend, OR. 17 August 2004.

 

 

Summary: A few years later he published Age of Iron (1990), a novel that focuses on the deforming impact of apartheid structures on life and art in South Africa.

Age of Iron differs from its predecessors in that it deals quite explicitly with contemporary political realities in South Africa. The setting is specified as Cape Town, and, although the date is not provided, various details situate the novel temporally in the winter of 1986, a period in South African history that, as the title of the novel suggests, was characterized by unmitigated violence, bloodshed, and political intransigence. It was a time of death not only for the country as a whole but also for Coetzee personally, who, during the writing of the novel, lost four relatives--his former wife (the couple had divorced in 1980), both parents, and his son, Nicholas. Not surprisingly, then, the novel is, as Malvern van Wyk Smith claims, "a meditation on death, on many levels."

Its protagonist, Mrs. Curren, is an elderly woman suffering from terminal cancer who, on the day she is informed of the incurability of her condition, encounters in her backyard a mysterious tramp named Vercueil. The latter, she thus infers, is an angel of death. The other relationships in the novel are also marked by death: Mrs. Curren's domestic servant, Florence, harbors two teenage "comrades" (activists for the African National Congress) in her quarters, one of whom is her son and both of whom die violently in the course of the novel. Even the settings in the novel are tainted by death: Mrs. Curren's house is in an advanced state of decay, and so is the country as a whole. Moreover, Mrs. Curren's visit to the township while assisting Florence in her search for her missing son is metaphorically depicted as a visit to Hades, and the township is physically described as a "zone of killing and degradation." It comes as no surprise that this bleak novel ends with the implied death of Mrs. Curren herself--a conclusion that is conveyed in the form of a letter that itself is defunct since, as Van Wyk Smith points out, it is addressed to Mrs. Curren's daughter in Canada "who is, to all intents and purposes, 'dead.'"

In terms of its depiction of relationships of power, Age of Iron follows a similar pattern to Coetzee's earlier novels. The by now familiar scenario in which one character attempts to re-create another is repeated in this novel in Mrs. Curren's relationship with Vercueil. Although realistically portrayed and set in a specified urban setting, a network of allusions and references to the Circe myth from Homer's The Odyssey make it clear that this relationship constitutes yet another island encounter "of the Robinsonian kind." Whereas Circe attempts to turn Odysseus into a pig, Mrs. Curren endeavors to turn Vercueil into a manservant and angel of death. Both, however, fail in these attempts at re-creation. Odysseus receives from Hermes the mythical herb moly, which renders him immune to Circe's spells, while Vercueil's silence and addiction to alcohol protect him from Mrs. Curren's authorial endeavors.

Although Coetzee's treatment of this relationship follows a clearly recognizable course, the same cannot be said of Mrs. Curren's relationship to Florence and her children, which eventually forms the subject of a metafictional meditation on the status of art in South Africa. In developing this relationship, Coetzee sets up an opposition between white suburbia and black township life in South Africa, an opposition that is emphasized by Mrs. Curren's visit to Guguletu township, during which she is confronted with a "looming world of rage and violence" where people are "revealed in their true names." The indubitable reality of this "otherworld" questions the reality of her own white bourgeois environment, which occludes it in media representations of South Africa as "a land of smiling neighbours." Thus, as Mrs. Curren comes to realize following her visit to the township, the very fabric of her society is baseless, a fiction manufactured by the social engineers of apartheid.

In protest, Mrs. Curren contemplates burning herself outside the House of Parliament, which she aptly refers to as the "House of Lies." She hopes, by immolating herself in this way, to "redeem" herself and "rise above my times." But, as she eventually realizes, such an act would be "deeply false," not the innocent self-effacing gesture of protest it purports to be, but a self-affirming "spectacle," calculated both to rid her of the strong sense of unreality that plagues her following her visit to the township and to gain her recognition from the "otherworld." Hence her obsession with Florence's imagined reaction to the "spectacle," were she to see it. Significantly, her speculations in this regard culminate with the dream in which "Florence does not stop to watch. Gaze fixed ahead, she passes as if through a congregation of wraiths." Like the representations of the cultural other in Coetzee's earlier novels, Florence refuses to acknowledge the doubting self's existence and thereby enable it to affirm its reality.

There is a strong indication in these passages that Mrs. Curren's "spectacle" should be seen as an analogue for white literature in South Africa. Not only is it compared to a literary work open to multiple interpretations, but Mrs. Curren likens herself to "a juggler, a clown, an entertainer," that is, to an artist of sorts. The suggestion seems to be that, like Mrs. Curren's "spectacle," literature by white South African writers constitutes a trivial gesture whose function is narcissistic rather than interventionist, that is, calculated to allay an endemic sense of guilt and to affirm a precarious sense of self. Indeed, the novel, by positing an ontological rift between white suburban unreality and the violent reality of the black townships, represented in the terms of the Greek underworld, implies that the white South African writer's order of experience is so different from that of the black South African as to render it impossible for him/her to represent black life. In this regard, Mrs. Curren's words, after having visited the township, are significant: "To speak of this . . . you would need the tongue of a god." Later, she even comes to question the legitimacy of a white South African "voice": "What am I entitled to do but sit in a corner with my mouth shut? I have no voice." And she decides that the words of her diary are "misshapen"--an image of deformity that has previously been reserved for her cancerous tumors and for the political situation in South Africa. The point that Coetzee makes here is that even language--the very condition of possibility for the novel and for protest--has been contaminated by the politics of violence in South Africa. Thus, Age of Iron questions the possibility of effective literary protest from within the prison house of a deformed language.

Despite its trenchant criticism of white writing, however, this novel does not advocate silence as the only authentic avenue open to the white writer. After all, as a linguistic artifact, the novel itself is a product of white South African writing. Moreover, Mrs. Curren, significantly enough, keeps on writing until she dies. After echoing Hamlet with the words, "The rest should be silence," she goes on to say: "But with this--whatever it is--this voice that is no voice, I go on. On and on." And she does so in order to preserve that which "is condemned unheard," which is "everything indefinite, everything that gives when you press it." This category encompasses everything that has become obsolete in the age of iron in which "only blows are real, blows and bullets": people such as Vercueil, concepts such as Mrs. Curren's liberal humanist values, and, ironically enough, things like words and "devious discourse" such as the novel form itself. The point behind the notion of the "unheard" seems to be that the function of literature in a society that has been dehumanized by an iniquitous political system should be to preserve the idea of humanity. This concept of the function of literature explains the constant allusions to the Circe myth in the novel. When, for example, Mrs. Curren witnesses the violence in the township, she notes its dehumanizing effect on her guide, Mr. Thabane: "His look had grown uglier. No doubt I grow uglier too by the day. Metamorphosis, that thickens our speech, dulls our feelings, turns us into beasts." She then concludes suggestively: "Where on these shores does the herb grow that will preserve us from it?" The implicit answer is that literature could serve this purpose. Just as the herb moly that Hermes gave Odysseus protected him from being transformed into a pig by Circe, so too art could protect South Africans from the dehumanizing influence of the cycle of violence in their society. Coetzee has his characters act out this possibility when Mrs. Curren, the surrogate author who describes herself as "Giving voice to the dead," commissions Vercueil, a Hermes figure, to bear her letter, the surrogate novel, to her daughter, the surrogate reader. The image of the novel conveyed by this triad of characters is that of a preserver and vocalizer of the "unheard," of ideas that have died and are dying. In this regard, Coetzee's final touch, that is, to make the Hermes figure who bears this literary version of the herb moly an alcoholic, is significant: alcohol is punningly described in the novel as "Mollificans," as that which "softens, preserves" and which "dissolves iron."

Age of Iron is ultimately a meditation on the role of literature in an "age of iron," that is, in a political climate that is hostile not only to the idea of humanity but also to the literary form that, over the centuries, has served as a vehicle for this idea. As such it is also a response of sorts to attempts to dictate the form that the novel should follow in South Africa, attempts that inevitably relegate that which deviates from the prescribed pattern to the status of the "unheard." Van Wyk Smith touches on this metafictional debate in Age of Iron when he argues that Mrs. Curren's "intimate quest for a validating narrative, a story that attempts to write her back into a meaningful history even while recognising its own inability to do so, is precisely Coetzee's response to those who demand an actualised text commensurate with sociopolitical events."

Apart from Van Wyk Smith's article, the response from the South African critical establishment to the provocative metafictional polemic of this novel was surprisingly sparse. The more-general responses to the novel, however, have been positive on the whole. Lionel Abrahams found that "the articulate passion with which the novel's protagonist and its author respond to the historical horror. . . . is vastly different from the usual, more or less excited, gestures of solidarity or provocation, cheek or subscription that pass as protest." Benita Parry sees it as an "elegy to liberal humanism," and Riaan Malan describes it similarly as "the death rattle of the white liberal tradition in South African writing, and perhaps in South African society, too." Such responses hint at Coetzee's concern with the deforming effect apartheid structures have had on South African life and art.

(Marais, cite DLB article!!).

 

 

1992: Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews. [Literary Criticism & Interviews] Ed. David Attwell. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1992.

LC Call No.  PR9369.3.C58 Z464 1992 - one or more editions available from Summit

Summary:

Coetzee, J. M. "Into the Dark Chamber: The Novelist and South Africa." New York Times 12 Jan. 1986, Late City Final ed., sec. 7: 13. New York Times on the Web, 1998. 31 Aug. 2004 <http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/11/02/home/coetzee-chamber.html>.

[Collected in Doubling the Point, 1992:

In 1986, in his article "Into the Dark Chamber: The Writer and the South African State" (collected in Doubling the Point), Coetzee articulated the South African novelist's desire for the freedom that true change would bring: "When the choice is no longer limited to either looking on in horrified fascination as the blow falls or turning one's eyes away, then the novel can once again take as its province the whole of life, and even the torture chamber can be accorded a place in the design." Elsewhere, he has argued that such freedom is a precondition for the writing of novels that are truly great. As these statements indicate, the future direction of Coetzee's work, as with South African literature as a whole, will depend entirely on the nature and the extent of the change that South African society undergoes.

(Marais, cite DLB article!!).

In Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews, a collection of critical essays on Samuel Beckett, Franz Kafka, D. H. Lawrence, Nadine Gordimer, and others, Coetzee presents a "literary autobiography," according to Ann Irvine in a Library Journal review. Discussions of issues including censorship and popular culture and interviews with the author preceding each section round out the collection.

“J(ohn) M(axwell) Coetzee, 1940- .” 2 Oct. 2003.  Contemporary Authors Online.  Gale, 2003.  Gale Literature Resource Center [Online Subscription Database]. The Gale Group, 2004. Central Oregon Community College Library, Bend, OR. 17 August 2004.

 

 

 

1994: The Master of Petersburg. [novel] First Published: London: Secker & Warburg, 1994; New York: Viking, 1994.

LC Call No.  PR9369.3.C58 M3 . . .  - one or more editions available from Summit

Awards: Premio Modello, 1994, and Irish Times International Fiction Prize, 1995, for The Master of Petersburg;

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TIFFIN:

In The Master of Petersburg, Coetzee examines the child products of another "age of iron" through Dostoevsky's relationship with his step-son, in a rather different context of violence and revolution, that of prerevolutionary St. Petersburg. In spite of the setting, there are echoes of South Africa in the poverty and violence sponsored by an oppressive regime and in the mysterious death of Dostoevsky's step-son, Pavel, who may have been murdered by one of his revolutionary comrades (Nechaev), or by the police, or who may have committed suicide. The novel is also about life and writing, and about the compelling authority of artistic genius, which is shown to be inescapably grounded in a betrayal as profound and obsessive as that of the revolutionary Nechaev himself.

 

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In Coetzee's next novel, The Master of Petersburg, the central character is the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky, but the plot is only loosely based on his real life. In Coetzee's story, the novelist goes to St. Petersburg upon the death of his stepson, Pavel. He is devastated by grief for the young man, and begins an inquiry into his death. He discovers that Pavel was involved with a group of nihilists and was probably murdered either by their leader or by the police. During the course of his anguished investigation, Dostoevsky's creative processes are exposed; Coetzee shows him beginning work on his novel The Possessed.

In real life, Dostoevsky did have a stepson named Pavel; but he was a foppish idler, a constant source of annoyance and embarrassment to the writer. The younger man outlived his stepfather by some twenty years, and as Dostoevsky died, he would not allow Pavel near his deathbed. Some reviewers were untroubled by Coetzee's manipulation of the facts. "This is not, after all, a book about the real Dostoevsky; his name, and some facts connected to it, form a mask behind which Coetzee enacts a drama of parenthood, politics and authorship," Harriett Gilbert explained in New Statesman and Society. She went on to praise Coetzee's depiction of "the barbed-wire coils of grief and anger, of guilt, of sexual rivalry and envy, that Fyodor Mikhailovich negotiates as he enters Pavel's hidden life. From the moment he presses his face to the lad's white suit to inhale his smell, to when he sits down, picks up his pen and commits a paternal novelist's betrayal, his pain is depicted with such harsh clarity that pity is burnt away. If the novel begins uncertainly, it ends with scorching self-confidence."

“J(ohn) M(axwell) Coetzee, 1940- .” 2 Oct. 2003.  Contemporary Authors Online.  Gale, 2003.  Gale Literature Resource Center [Online Subscription Database]. The Gale Group, 2004. Central Oregon Community College Library, Bend, OR. 17 August 2004.

 

 

 

Summary: The novel recreates the world of the Russian writer, Dostoevsky, with him as the protagonist. He returns from exile to St. Petersburg to investigate the death of his stepson, officially a suicide, but as he was a revolutionary Dostoevsky suspects murder.

In 1991 Coetzee spent a year as visiting professor of English at Harvard University. His next novel, The Master of Petersburg, was published in 1994 and was therefore written during the period in which the apartheid government finally collapsed. Far from dealing with this momentous transition, though, The Master of Petersburg is set in late-nineteenth-century Russia.

So, while Age of Iron seemed to suggest a desire on Coetzee's part to engage more directly with the overt politics of the day in South Africa, the more recent novel appears to indicate a return to the strategy of temporal and geographical displacement that characterizes his earlier work. Apart from this difference, these two novels are remarkably similar.

As in the earlier text, in The Master of Petersburg Coetzee deals with the deforming impact of societal structures of power and the role that literature plays in either reinforcing or resisting these structures. Set in St. Petersburg, this novel focuses on the murder of a young student, Ivanov, by a group of nihilists led by Sergei Nechaev. This incident is probably best remembered as the historical event that prompted Fyodor Dostoyevsky to write The Devils (1871), a work in which he tried to link moral evil and political nihilism. Dostoyevsky achieved this identification by means of the biblical story of the Gadarene swine, a tale in which unclean devils, having been exorcized from a sick man by Jesus Christ, enter a herd of swine. This story generates in the novel a series of analogies that suggest Russia is a "sick man" possessed by devils and that the swine that the devils enter on being exorcized are the revolutionaries.

In The Master of Petersburg Coetzee employs the same parallels--as becomes apparent when his own character, Dostoyevsky, argues that it is futile to imprison revolutionaries such as Sergei Nechaev since nihilism is a "spirit" for which the individual is merely a "vehicle," a "host." This parallelism does not mean, however, that Coetzee shares the actual Dostoyevsky 's conviction that the nihilists are possessed by the devil. It is significant in this regard that Coetzee applies the story of the Gadarene swine not only to Russia and the phenomenon of revolutionary nihilism but also to Dostoyevsky himself and his literary response to this phenomenon. Thus, in The Master of Petersburg, Dostoyevsky is depicted as a "sick man" possessed by devils. And, while engaging in sexual intercourse with him, Anna Sergeyevna, at the onset of climax, utters the word "devil." Importantly, in this scene the sexual act is depicted as both an inspiration and an exorcism, with Anna Sergeyevna occupying the dual role of muse and exorcist. As the novel ends shortly afterward with Dostoyevsky commencing work on The Devils, the implication is, therefore, that this text is also to be equated with the exorcized spirits in the story of the Gadarene swine. The further inference is that the readers within whom copies of the novel can be said to take up residence correspond to the swine in the biblical story.

Coetzee's reworking of the story of the Gadarene swine in The Master of Petersburg appears to be a comment on the implication of writer and literature in the power dynamics or "sickness" of the social context in which they are located. Through applying the story to the artist and the artistic process itself, Coetzee suggests that Dostoyevsky and his work are not immune to the "sickness" of Russia. Both are a part of Russia and are therefore also "sick."

The point Coetzee makes in this text is, therefore, similar to that which emerges from his previous novel: that the literature produced in an "age of iron," that is, a society and a period that have been "defined" and thus debased by "unnatural structures of power," is "a less than fully human literature." In its inevitable preoccupation with "power and the torsions of power," such literature is as "stunted" and "deformed" as the life that it seeks to represent. Accordingly, it colludes with the networks of power that have dehumanized the society. In this regard, it is significant that the imagery Coetzee uses in The Master of Petersburg to indicate literature's ability to brutalize is similar to that which he uses in Age of Iron to suggest the dehumanizing impact of the state's power relations. In both cases, the imagery is of a metamorphosis into swine.

(Marais, cite DLB article!!).

 

1996: Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship. [essays] Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1996.

LC Call No. Z657 .C658 1996 - one or more editions available from Summit

 

Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship was Coetzee's first collection of essays in nearly ten years, since White Writing appeared. The essays collected in Giving Offense were written over a period of about six years. Here Coetzee--a writer quite familiar with the varying forms of censorship and the writer's response to them--attempts to complicate what he calls "the two tired images of the writer under censorship: the moral giant under attack from hordes of moral pygmies and the helpless innocent persecuted by a mighty state apparatus." Coetzee discusses three tyrannical regimes: Nazism, Communism, and apartheid; and, drawing upon his training as an academic scholar as well as his experiences as a fiction writer, argues that the censor and the writer have often been "brother-enemies, mirror images one of the other" in their struggle to claim the truth of their position.

“J(ohn) M(axwell) Coetzee, 1940- .” 2 Oct. 2003.  Contemporary Authors Online.  Gale, 2003.  Gale Literature Resource Center [Online Subscription Database]. The Gale Group, 2004. Central Oregon Community College Library, Bend, OR. 17 August 2004.

 

Summary:

 

 

1997?8?: Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life [I]. [memoir-autobiography]. New York: Penguin, 1998.

LC Call No. PR9369.3.C58 Z463 1998 - one or more editions available from Summit

 

In Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life, Coetzee experiments with autobiography, a surprising turn for a writer, as Caryl Phillips noted in the New Republic, "whose literary output has successfully resisted an autobiographical reading." Boyhood, written in the third person, "reads more like a novella than a true autobiography. Coetzee develops his character, a young boy on the verge of adolescence, through a richly detailed interior monolog," wrote Denise S. Sticha in Library Journal. He recounts his life growing up in Worcester, South Africa, where he moved with his family from Cape Town after his father's latest business failure. There, he observes the contradictions of apartheid and the subtle distinctions of class and ethnicity with a precociously writerly eye. Rand Richards Cooper, writing for the New York Times Book Review, stated that "Coetzee's themes lie where the political, the spiritual, the psychological and the physical converge: the nightmare of bureaucratic violence; or forlorn estrangement from the land; a Shakespearean anxiety about nature put out of its order; and the insistent neediness of the body." Coetzee, an Afrikaaner whose parents chose to speak English, finds himself between worlds, neither properly Afrikaaner nor English. Throughout his boyhood, he encounters the stupid brutalities inflicted by arbitrary divisions between white and black, Native and Coloured, Afrikaaner and English. Phillips speculated that "as a boy Coetzee feels compelled to learn how to negotiate the falsehoods that white South Africa offers up to those who wish to belong. In short, he develops the mentality of the writer. He fills his world with doubt, he rejects authority in all its forms--political, social, personal--and he cultivates the ability to resign himself to the overwhelming insecurity of the heart."

“J(ohn) M(axwell) Coetzee, 1940- .” 2 Oct. 2003.  Contemporary Authors Online.  Gale, 2003.  Gale Literature Resource Center [Online Subscription Database]. The Gale Group, 2004. Central Oregon Community College Library, Bend, OR. 17 August 2004.

 

Summary:

 

1999: The Lives of Animals. ["lecture-fable" by J. M. Coetzee + essays by other authors.] Ed. Amy Gutmann. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1999.

LC Call No. HV4708 .L57 [date] . . .  - one or more editions available from Summit

Summary: "J. M. Coetzee uses fiction to present a discussion of animal rights in all their complexity. He draws us into his character's own sense of mortality, her compassion for animals, and her alienation from humans, even from her own family. In his fable, presented as a Tanner Lecture sponsored by the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University, Coetzee immerses us in a drama reflecting the real-life situation at hand: a writer delivering a lecture on an emotionally charged issue at a prestigious university. The story is followed by responses treating the reader to a variety of perspectives, delivered by leading thinkers in different fields. Coetzee's text is accompanied by an introduction by political philosopher Amy Gutmann and responsive essays by religion scholar Wendy Doniger, primatologist Barbara Smuts, literary theorist Marjorie Garber, and moral philosopher Peter Singer, author of 'Animal Liberation.' Together the lecture-fable and the essays explore the palpable social consequences of uncompromising moral conflict and confrontation."

In 1999 Coetzee published three books. The Novel in Africa is the text of a lecture delivered in Berkeley, California, on 11 November 1998. The Lives of Animals is also based on a lecture, in that Coetzee delivered the central text as a Tanner Lecture in the Humanities at Princeton University, but it is actually more of a postmodernist fiction. At the heart of the book is a story that Coetzee read at Princeton; the story purports to be a lecture on animal rights delivered by an elderly novelist, Elizabeth Costello, with interpolations by other characters, who are responding to the lecture. The rest of the book is comprised of responses to Coetzee/Costello's lecture by various real-world academics in disciplines such as anthropology and bioethics.

(Marais, cite DLB article!!).

 

 

The Lives of Animals is a unique effort by Coetzee, incorporating his own lectures on animal rights with the fictional story of Elizabeth Costello, a novelist obsessed by the horrors of human cruelty to animals. In this "wonderfully inventive and inconclusive book," as Stephen H. Webb described it in Christian Century, Coetzee poses questions about the morality of vegetarianism and the guilt of those who use animal products. But his arguments are not simplistic: he wonders, for example, if vegetarians are really trying to save animals, or only trying to put themselves in a morally superior position to other humans. The character of Elizabeth Costello is revealed as deeply flawed, and the author's ambiguity about her "forces us to think," added Webb. Are her lectures "academic hyperbole and prophetic provocation? Are we meant to feel sorry for her or, angered by her poor reception, to stand up and defend her and her cause?" Following the novella, there are responses to Costello's arguments from four real-life scholars who have written about animals: Barbara Smuts, Peter Singer, Marjorie Garber, and Wendy Doniger. The sum of the book, wrote Marlene Chamberlain in Booklist, is valuable "for Coetzee fans and others interested in the links between philosophy, reason, and the rights of nonhumans."

“J(ohn) M(axwell) Coetzee, 1940- .” 2 Oct. 2003.  Contemporary Authors Online.  Gale, 2003.  Gale Literature Resource Center [Online Subscription Database]. The Gale Group, 2004. Central Oregon Community College Library, Bend, OR. 17 August 2004.

 

 

1999: Disgrace. [novel] New York: Viking, 1999.

LC Call No. PR9369.3.C58 D5 [date] . . . - one or more editions available from Summit

Awards: Booker Prize, 1999, National Book League and Commonwealth Writer's Prize: Best Novel, for Disgrace

"Excerpts from Disgrace." [Pages 111-112 and 183-184.] "J. M. Coetzee - Prose."
6 Nov. 2003. Nobel e-Museum. Nobel Foundation, 2004. 4 Sep. 2004 <http://www.nobel.se/literature/laureates/2003/coetzee-prose.html>.

Summary:

The third book published in 1999 was Coetzee's eighth novel, Disgrace, which is set in South Africa in the late 1990s. The protagonist, David Lurie, is a fifty-two-year-old professor at the Technical University of Cape Town. The novel opens with a consideration of the fate of an aging scholar, a specialist in the Romantic poets who is reduced to teaching introductory courses in "communications," which he despises, as the university has changed its emphasis from liberal arts to that of "technical education." Lurie has a brief affair with Melanie, one of his female students, who is oddly passive and ambivalent about the relationship. When the affair comes to the attention of the university authorities--Lurie suspects that Melanie's boyfriend has informed on him--Lurie is told by the school administration to apologize and enter into counseling if he wishes to save his career. Seeing himself as being scapegoated by the forces of political correctness, he pleads guilty to the charge of sexual harassment but refuses to apologize or be repentant.

Leaving the university in disgrace, Lurie goes to visit his lesbian daughter, Lucy, who lives alone on a smallholding in the Eastern Cape. She is eking out a meager existence managing dog kennels and raising flowers and vegetables for market in cooperation with her black neighbor, Petrus. For a time Lurie finds a sort of peace on the farm as he helps Lucy, though the two have had an uneasy relationship since he and Lucy's mother divorced some years earlier. The fragile peace is shattered, however, when the farm is invaded by three men who at first pretend to need help and then attack Lurie and his daughter, setting him on fire and locking him in the bathroom while they sexually assault Lucy.

The remainder of the novel concerns Lurie and his daughter's attempts to come to terms with what has happened to them. The three attackers were black, and Lucy comes to see the rape as a sort of retribution for historical racial injustice. She is pregnant as a result of the rape and is determined to keep the child. Lurie is horrified by her response, but he too sees the assault in terms of historical inevitability, as the result of a sort of inherited guilt.

In a review of the book for The New York Times (11 November 1999), Christopher Lehmann-Haupt noted that the book reflects the uncertainty of postapartheid South Africa, where "all values are shifting"; he also noted that "The effect of the novel's plot is deeply disturbing, in part because of what happens to David and Lucy, but equally because of the disintegrating context of their experiences." Reviewing the book for the 27 July 1999 Mail & Guardian (Johannesburg), Jane Taylor called the novel "remarkable in its gauging of the contemporary dilemmas arising from our circumstances in a society obsessed by our own violent context." Noting that central to the work is "the failure of the imagination," she pointed out that in this aspect Disgrace is linked to The Lives of Animals: "these two works in conjunction explore the sealing off of imaginative identification that has been a necessary precondition for us to engage in the long-term and sustained business of slaughter."

Writing in The New Republic (20 December 1999), James Wood argued that "a significant weakness" in the novel is the "formal parallel of disgrace": as a result of what happened to Lucy, and her reaction to it, Lurie comes to accept the necessity of being penitent for his actions, but the "formal parallel" equates his disgrace with Lucy, and hers is, Wood argues, "not one that she earned or deserved." Wood also noted that the "rather shocking notion of rape as historical reparation. . . . has earned Coetzee a certain amount of covert condemnation." Disgrace was generally critically well received, however, and earned Coetzee a second Booker-McConell Prize--he thus became the only novelist in the thirty-one-year history of the award to win twice.

(Marais, cite DLB article!!).

 

 

 

 

Disgrace, Coetzee's next novel, is a strong statement on the political climate in post-apartheid South Africa. The main character, David Lurie, is an English professor at University of Cape Town. He sees himself as an aging, but still handsome, Lothario. He has seduced many young women in his day, but an affair with one of his students finally proves his undoing. Charged with sexual harassment, he leaves his post in disgrace, seeking refuge at the small farm owned by his daughter, Lucy. Lucy and David are anything but alike. While his world is refined and highly intellectualized, Lucy works at hard physical labor in simple surroundings. David has allowed his sexual desires to lead him, while Lucy is living a life of voluntary celibacy. While David was in an elitist position, Lucy works alongside her black neighbors. David's notions of orderliness are overturned when three men come to the farm, set him afire, and rape Lucy. Father and daughter survive the ordeal, only to learn that Lucy has become pregnant. Eventually, in order to protect herself and her simple way of life, she consents to become the third wife in her neighbor's polygamous family, even though he may have arranged the attack on her in order to gain control of her property.

The complex story of Disgrace drew praise from critics. "The novel's many literary allusions are remarkably cohesive on the subject of spiritual alienation: Lucifer, Cain, the tragedy of birth in Wordsworth--there is a full and even fulsome repertoire of soullessness," remarked Sarah Ruden in Christian Century. "The same theme can be found in many modernist and postmodernist writers, but Coetzee cancels the usual pretentious and self-pitying overtones." Antioch Review contributor John Kennedy noted, "In its honest and relentless probing of character and motive . . . this novel secures Coetzee's place among today's major novelists. . . . The impulses and crimes of passion, the inadequacies of justice, and the rare possibilities for redemption are played out on many levels in this brilliantly crafted book." The author's deft handling of the ambiguities of his story was also praised by Rebecca Saunders, who in Review of Contemporary Fiction warned that Disgrace is "not for the ethically faint of heart." Saunders felt Coetzee has "strewn nettles in the bed of the comfortable social conscience," and his book is written in the style "we have come to expect" from him, "at once taciturn and blurting out the unspeakable."

“J(ohn) M(axwell) Coetzee, 1940- .” 2 Oct. 2003.  Contemporary Authors Online.  Gale, 2003.  Gale Literature Resource Center [Online Subscription Database]. The Gale Group, 2004. Central Oregon Community College Library, Bend, OR. 17 August 2004.

 

 

 

2001: Stranger Shores: Literary Essays, 1986-1999. [essays, literary criticism] 2001. New York: Penguin, 2002.

LC Call No. PR9369.3.C58 S77 [date] . . . - one or more editions available from Summit

Summary:

 

Insight into the workings of Coetzee's mind is afforded through Stranger Shores: Literary Essays, 1986-1999, which collects twenty-six essays of literary criticism by the author, focusing on authors such as Franz Kafka, Salman Rushdie, Nadine Gordimer, and Jorge Luis Borges. "These are not puff pieces," warned James Shapiro in New York Times Book Review. In his criticism, "Coetzee wields a sharp scalpel, carefully exposing the stylistic flaws, theoretical shortcuts and, on occasion, bad faith of writers he otherwise admires." An Economist contributor found the tone of the book "dry tending to arid," and Alberto Manguel in Spectator suggested that the collection lacked a needed "touch of passion." Yet Shapiro thought that Stranger Shores is a fine model of "blunt, elegant and unflinching criticism at a time when novelists tend to go rather easy when reviewing their colleagues." Finally, Shapiro concluded, Stranger Shores is valuable for the "light it casts on a stage in the intellectual journey of one of the most cerebral and consequential writers of our day."

“J(ohn) M(axwell) Coetzee, 1940- .” 2 Oct. 2003.  Contemporary Authors Online.  Gale, 2003.  Gale Literature Resource Center [Online Subscription Database]. The Gale Group, 2004. Central Oregon Community College Library, Bend, OR. 17 August 2004.

 

 

2002: Youth: Scenes from Provincial Life II. [memoir-autobiography]. New York: Penguin, 2002.

LC Call no: PR9369.3.C58 Y68 2002  - one or more editions available from Summit

Summary:

 

2003: Elizabeth Costello. [novel] New York: Viking, 2003.

LC Call No. PR9369.3.C58 E44 2003 - one or more editions available from Summit

Summary:

2003: Awards: Nobel Prize for Literature; Life Fellow, University of Cape Town

Other Works by J. M. Coetzee

 

1998, Nov. "The Novel in Africa

Coetzee, J. M. The Novel in Africa. Berkeley, CA: Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities, 1999.

Call No.: PR9369.3.C58 N6 1999 - Summit

The Novel in Africa, is the text of November 1998's Una's Lecture, delivered by South African novelist J.M. Coetzee. "The lecture, embedded in a fiction, produces both irritation and surprise." Read the abstract or download the publication. 28 p. in Adobe pdf. (Townsend Center, Occasional Papers 17). http://ls.berkeley.edu/dept/townsend/pubs/publications_top.html

Coetzee, J. M. "Awakening." Rev. of Jump and The Pickup, by Nadine Gordimer. New York Review of Books [50.16] 23 October 2003. NYREV 2004. 31 Aug. 2004 <http://www.nybooks.com/articles/16670>.

Coetzee, J. M. "He and His Man." "J. M. Coetzee - Nobel Lecture." [English language version.] 7 Dec. 2003. Nobel e-Museum. Nobel Foundation, 2004. 4 Sep. 2004 <http://www.nobel.se/literature/laureates/2003/coetzee-lecture-e.html>.

Coetzee, J. M. "Into the Dark Chamber: The Novelist and South Africa." New York Times 12 Jan. 1986, Late City Final ed., sec. 7: 13. New York Times on the Web, 1998. 31 Aug. 2004 <http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/11/02/home/coetzee-chamber.html>.

[Collected in Doubling the Point, 1992:

In 1986, in his article "Into the Dark Chamber: The Writer and the South African State" (collected in Doubling the Point), Coetzee articulated the South African novelist's desire for the freedom that true change would bring: "When the choice is no longer limited to either looking on in horrified fascination as the blow falls or turning one's eyes away, then the novel can once again take as its province the whole of life, and even the torture chamber can be accorded a place in the design." Elsewhere, he has argued that such freedom is a precondition for the writing of novels that are truly great. As these statements indicate, the future direction of Coetzee's work, as with South African literature as a whole, will depend entirely on the nature and the extent of the change that South African society undergoes.

(Marais, cite DLB article!!).

 

Coetzee, J. M. "J. M. Coetzee - Biography." Nobel e-Museum. Nobel Foundation, Swedish Academy. 2004.  30 August 2004 <http://www.nobel.se/literature/laureates/2003/coetzee-bio.html>.

"J. M. Coetzee: Banquet Speech." 10 Dec. 2003. Nobel e-Museum. Nobel Foundation, 2003. 4 Sep. 2004 <http://www.nobel.se/literature/laureates/2003/coetzee-speech-e.html>.

  • (With Graham Swift, John Lanchester, and Ian Jack) Food: The Vital Stuff, Penguin (New York, NY), 1995.
  • (With Bill Reichblum) What Is Realism?, Bennington College (Bennington, VT), 1997.
  • (With Dan Cameron and Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev) William Kentridge, Phaidon (London, England), 1999.
  • The Humanities in Africa/Die Geisteswissenschaften in Afrika, Carl Friedrich von Siemens Stiftung (Munich, Germany), 2001.

 

Translations by J. M. Coetzee

  • (Translator) Marcellus Emants, A Posthumous Confession, Twayne (Boston, MA), 1976.
  • (Translator) Wilma Stockenstroem, The Expedition to the Baobab Tree, Faber (London, England), 1983.
  • (Translator and author of introduction) Landscape With Rowers: Poetry from the Netherlands, Princeton University Press, in press.

 
 

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Bibliography

Attridge, Derek. J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading: Literature in the Event. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2004.

LC Call No. PR9369.3.C58 Z53 2004 -  available to COCC students from Summit

Attridge, Derek. "J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace: Introduction." Editorial. [Special Issue devoted to Disgrace, by J. M. Coetzee.]  Interventions: The International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 4.3 (Nov. 2002): 315-320.

Full text in .pdf format available to COCC students from EBSCO Academic Search Premier online subscription database

Attridge, Derek. "Literary Form and the Demands of Politics: Otherness in J. M. Coetzee's Age of Iron."  Aesthetics and Ideology. Ed. George Levine. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1994. 243-263.

Attridge, Derek. "Trusting the Other: Ethics and Politics in J. M. Coetzee's Age of Iron." South Atlantic Quarterly, 93.1 (1994): 59-82.

Attwell, David. "The Problem of History in the Fiction of J. M. Coetzee." Rendering Things Visible: Essays on South African Literary Culture of the 1970s and 1980s. Ed. Martin Trump. Johannesburg: Ravan, 1990. 94-133.

Attwell, David. "Race in Disgrace." [Special Issue devoted to Disgrace, by J. M. Coetzee.]  Interventions: The International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 4.3 (Nov. 2002): 331-341.

Full text in .pdf format available to COCC students from EBSCO Academic Search Premier online subscription database

Banville, John. "Being and Nothingness." Rev. of Elizabeth Costello, by J. M. Coetzee. Nation 3 Nov. 2003: 30-33 (4pp). Academic Search Premier (11125301). EBSCOhost. Central Oregon Community College Library, Bend, OR. 6 Sep. 2004.

EBSCO Academic Search Premier subscription database articles are available online to COCC students.

Barnard, Rita. "Coetzee's Country Ways." [Special Issue devoted to Disgrace, by J. M. Coetzee.]  Interventions: The International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 4.3 (Nov. 2002): 384-394.

Full text in .pdf format available to COCC students from EBSCO Academic Search Premier online subscription database

Barnard, Rita. "J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace and the South African Pastoral." Contemporary Literature: 44.2 (Summer 2003): 199-224.

Full text in .pdf format available to COCC students from EBSCO Academic Search Premier online subscription database

Barney, Richard A. "Between Swift and Kafka." J. M. Coetzee Special Section. World Literature Today 78.1 (Jan.-April 2004): 17-23 (7pp). Academic Search Premier (11810873). EBSCOhost. Central Oregon Community College Library, Bend, OR. 6 Sep. 2004.

EBSCO Academic Search Premier subscription database articles are available online to COCC students.

Barzun, Jacques. "Byron and the Byronic." Atlantic Monthly August 1953.  The Atlantic Online. 2004. 1 Sept. 2004 <http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/53aug/barzun.htm>. 

Bishop, G. Scott. "J. M. Coetzee's Foe: A Culmination and a Solution to a Problem of White Identity." World Literature Today 64.1 (Winter 1990): 54-57.

Full text available to COCC students from Gale Literature Resource Center online subscription database.

Blyn, Sara. "Apartheid Literature." Fall 2001. Post Colonial Studies at Emory. Ed. Deepika Bahri (Dept. of English, Emory Univ., Atlanta, GA). 4 Sep. 2004 <http://www.emory.edu/ENGLISH/Bahri/apartlit.html>.

Boehmer, Elleke. "Not Saying Sorry, Not Speaking Pain: Gender Implications in Disgrace." [Special Issue devoted to Disgrace, by J. M. Coetzee.]  Interventions: The International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 4.3 (Nov. 2002): 342-351.

Full text in .pdf format available to COCC students from EBSCO Academic Search Premier online subscription database

Brink, André P. "Writing against Big Brother: Notes on Apocalyptic Fiction in South Africa." World Literature Today 58.2 (1984): 189-194.

Byrne, Deirdre C. "Science Fiction in South Africa." Correspondents Abroad. PMLA 119.3 (May 2004): 522-529.

Carusi, Annamaria. "Foe: The Narrative and Power." Journal of Literary Studies 5.2 (1989): 134-144. 

Castillo, Debra A. "The Composition of the Self in Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians." Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction 27.2 (Winter 1986): 78-90. 

Chapman, Michael. "The Writing of Politics and the Politics of Writing: On Reading Dovey on Reading Lacan on Reading Coetzee on Reading . . . (?)." Journal of Literary Studies 4.3 (1988): 327-341.

Clark, David Draper. Editor's Note: J. M. Coetzee Special Section. World Literature Today 78.1 (Jan.-April 2004): 3-5 (3pp). Academic Search Premier (11810867). EBSCOhost. Central Oregon Community College Library, Bend, OR. 6 Sep. 2004.

EBSCO Academic Search Premier subscription database articles are available online to COCC students.

Clayton, Cherry. "Uprooting the Malignant Fictions." Rev. of White Writing, by J. M. Coetzee; and Hopes and Impediments, by Chinua Achebe. The Times Literary Supplement [No. 4460] 23 September 1988: 1043.

Coetzee, J. M. "Excerpts from Disgrace." [Pages 111-112 and 183-184.] "J. M. Coetzee - Prose." 6 Nov. 2003. Nobel e-Museum. Nobel Foundation, 2004. 4 Sep. 2004 <http://www.nobel.se/literature/laureates/2003/coetzee-prose.html>.

Coetzee, J. M. "Fever and Flame." [Excerpt from Youth.] American Scholar 71.3 (Summer 2002): 17 (9pp.) Academic Search Premier (7254252). EBSCOhost. Central Oregon Community College Library, Bend, OR. 6 Sep. 2004.

EBSCO Academic Search Premier subscription database articles are available online to COCC students.

Coetzee, J. M. "He and His Man." Nobel Lecture 2003. PMLA 119.3 (May 2004): 547-552.

Coetzee, J. M. "How I Learned about America - and Africa - in Texas." J. M. Coetzee Special Section. World Literature Today 78.1 (Jan.-April 2004): 6-7 (2pp). Academic Search Premier (11810868). EBSCOhost. Central Oregon Community College Library, Bend, OR. 6 Sep. 2004.

EBSCO Academic Search Premier subscription database articles are available online to COCC students.
 Abstract: Account by Coetzee about when he was a graduate student at the University of Texas, Austin in the 1960s. First published in the New York Times, April 15, 1984:
http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/11/02/home/coetzee-learned.html

Cooper, Rand Richards. "Portrait of the Writer as an Afrikaner." Rev. of Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life, by J. M. Coetzee. New York Times 2 Nov. 1997. New York Times on the Web. 1997. 31 Aug. 2004 <http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/11/02/reviews/971102.02coopert.html>.

Cornwell, Gareth. "Realism, Rape, and J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace." Critique 43.4 (June 2002): 307 (16pp).  Academic Search Premier (7254252). EBSCOhost. Central Oregon Community College Library, Bend, OR. 6 Sep. 2004.

EBSCO Academic Search Premier subscription database articles are available online to COCC students.

Cowley, Jason. "Despite a Booker Nomination and a Nobel Prize, These Writers, Unheard in Their Own Land, Feel Oppressed by Emptiness." New Statesman 13 Oct. 2003: 22 (3pp). Academic Search Premier (11030849). EBSCOhost. Central Oregon Community College Library, Bend, OR. 6 Sep. 2004.

EBSCO Academic Search Premier subscription database articles are available online to COCC students.

Cowley, Jason. "J. M. Coetzee: The Ideal Chronicler of the New South Africa, He Deserves to make Literary History as a Double Booker Winner." New Statesman 25 Oct. 1999:18 (3pp). Academic Search Premier (2436548). EBSCOhost. Central Oregon Community College Library, Bend, OR. 6 Sep. 2004.

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de Graef, Ortwin. "Suffering, Sympathy, Circulation: Smith, Wordsworth, Coetzee (But There's a Dog)." European Journal of English Studies 7.3 (2003): 311-331.

Full text in .pdf format available to COCC students from EBSCO Academic Search Premier online subscription database

De Kock, Leon. "Literature, Politics and Universalism: A Debate between Es'kia Mphahlele and J. M. Coetzee." Journal of Literary Studies 3.4 (1987): 35-48.

Diala, Isidore. "Nadine Gordimer, J. M. Coetzee, and Andre Brink: Guilt, Expiation, and the Reconciliation Process in Post-Apartheid South Africa." Journal of Modern Literature 25.2 (Winter 2001/2002): 50-68.

Full text in .pdf format available to COCC students from EBSCO Academic Search Premier online subscription database

Dodd, Josephine. "Naming and Framing: Naturalization and Colonization in J. M. Coetzee's In the Heart of the Country." World Literature Written in English 27.2 (Autumn 1987): 153-61.

Dovey, Teresa. "Coetzee and His Critics: The Case of Dusklands." English in Africa 14.2 (1987): 15-30.

Dovey, Teresa. "The Intersection of Postmodern, Postcolonial and Feminist Discourse in J. M. Coetzee's Foe." Journal of Literary Studies 5.2 (1989): 119-133.

Dovey, Teresa. The Novels of J.M. Coetzee: Lacanian Allegories. Cape Town and Johannesburg, South Africa: Donker, 1988.

LC Call No. PR9369.3.C58 Z75 1988 - available to COCC students from Summit

Du Plessis, Michael. "Bodies and Signs: Inscriptions of Femininity in John Coetzee and Wilma Stockenström." Journal of Literary Studies 4.1 (1988): 118-128.

Durrant, Sam. "Bearing Witness to Apartheid: J. M. Coetzee's Inconsolable Works of Mourning." Contemporary Literature 40.3 (Fall 1999): 430 (34pp). Academic Search Premier (2373151). EBSCOhost. Central Oregon Community College Library, Bend, OR. 6 Sep. 2004.

EBSCO Academic Search Premier subscription database articles are available online to COCC students.

Durrant, Sam. Postcolonial Narrative and the Work of Mourning: J. M. Coetzee, Wilson Harris, and Toni Morrison. Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 2004.

LC Call No. PR9369.3.C58 Z65 2004 -available from Summit

Eckstein, Barbara. "The Body, the Word, and the State: J. M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians." Novel 22.2 (1989): 175-198.

Farrad, Grant. "The Mundanacity of Violence: Living in a State of Disgrace." [Special Issue devoted to Disgrace, by J. M. Coetzee.]  Interventions: The International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 4.3 (Nov. 2002): 3.

Full text in .pdf format available to COCC students from EBSCO Academic Search Premier online subscription database

"Featured Author: J. M. Coetzee, with News and Reviews from the Archives of The New York Times." New York Times on the Web, 1999. 31 Aug. 2004 <http://www.nytimes.com/books/99/11/28/specials/coetzee.html>.

Fitzgerald, Michael. "Serendipity." J. M. Coetzee Special Section. World Literature Today 78.1 (Jan.-April 2004): 24-25 (2pp). Academic Search Premier (11810874). EBSCOhost. Central Oregon Community College Library, Bend, OR. 6 Sep. 2004.

EBSCO Academic Search Premier subscription database articles are available online to COCC students.

Fraser, David. Rev. of The Lives of Animals, by J. M. Coetzee. Quarterly Review of Biology 76.2 (June 2001): 215 (2pp). Academic Search Premier (4647139). EBSCOhost. Central Oregon Community College Library, Bend, OR. 6 Sep. 2004.

EBSCO Academic Search Premier subscription database articles are available online to COCC students.

Gallagher, Susan VanZanten. A Story of South Africa: J. M. Coetzee's Fiction in Context. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1991.

LC Call No. PR9369.3.C58 Z66 1991 - available from Summit

Gallagher, Susan Van Zanten. "Torture and the Novel: J. M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians." Contemporary Literature 29.2 (Summer 1988): 277-85.

Gardiner, Allan. "J. M. Coetzee's Dusklands: Colonial Encounters of the Robinsonian Kind." World Literature Written in English 27.2 (Autumn 1987): 174-84.

Gillmer, Joan. "The Motif of the Damaged Child in the Work of J. M. Coetzee." Momentum: On Recent South African Writing. Ed. M. J. Daymond, J. U. Jacobs, and Margaret Lenta. Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press and London: Currey, 1984. 107-120.

Glenn-Lauga, Catherine. "The Hearerly Text: Sea Shells on the Sea Shore." Journal of Literary Studies 5.2 (1989): 194-214.

Gorra, Michael. "After the Fall." Rev. of Disgrace, by J. M. Coetzee. New York Times 28 Nov. 1999. New York Times on the Web, 1999. 31 Aug. 2004 <http://www.nytimes.com/books/99/11/28/reviews/991128.28gorrat.html>.

COCC Library holds periodical subscription to The New York Times.

Graham, Lucy Valerie. "Reading the Unspeakable: Rape in J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace." Journal of Southern African Studies 29.2 (June 2003): 433-444.

Full text in .pdf format available to COCC students from EBSCO Academic Search Premier online subscription database

Gunnars, Kristjana, and Abdulrazak Gurnah. "A Writer's Writer: Two Perspectives." J. M. Coetzee Special Section. World Literature Today 78.1 (Jan.-April 2004): 11-13 (3pp). Academic Search Premier (11810871). EBSCOhost. Central Oregon Community College Library, Bend, OR. 6 Sep. 2004.

EBSCO Academic Search Premier subscription database articles are available online to COCC students.

Head, Dominic. J.M. Coetzee. Cambridge Studies in African and Caribbean Literature. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1997.

LC Call No. PR9369.3.C58 Z68 1997 - available from Summit

Hewson, Kelly. "Making the `Revolutionary Gesture': Nadine Gordimer, J. M. Coetzee and Some Variations on the Writer's Responsibility." Ariel: A Review of International English Literature 19.4 (October 1988): 55-72.

Holland, Michael. "'Plink-Plunk': Unforgetting the Present in Coetzee's Disgrace." [Special Issue devoted to Disgrace, by J. M. Coetzee.]  Interventions: The International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 4.3 (Nov. 2002): 395-404.

Full text in .pdf format available to COCC students from EBSCO Academic Search Premier online subscription database

Hook, Derek. Rev. of Stranger Shores: Essays 1986-1999, by J. M. Coetzee. Theoria: A Journal of Social and Political Theory April 2004: 143-145.

Full text in .pdf format available to COCC students from EBSCO Academic Search Premier online subscription database

Huggan, Graham, and Stephen Watson, ed. Critical Perspectives on J.M. Coetzee. New York : St. Martin's Press, 1996.

LC Call No. PR9369.3.C58 Z638 1996 - available from Summit

"J. M. Coetzee (1940- )." The Authors. Guardian Unlimited Books [Manchester, UK], Guardian Newspapers, 2004. 31 Aug. 2004 <http://books.guardian.co.uk/authors/author/0,5917,-43,00.html>.

Page offers links to several review articles, as well as excerpts from Coetzee's works:
"JM Coetzee's Nobel Lecture: 'He and His Man'":
 http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/generalfiction/story/0,6000,1103195,00.html
"Lost in London," Excerpt from Youth: Scenes from Provincial Life II (memoir):
 http://books.guardian.co.uk/extracts/story/0,6761,1059934,00.html
"'That Is Not Where I Come From,'" Excerpt from Elizabeth Costello (novel):
http://books.guardian.co.uk/extracts/story/0,6761,1055012,00.html
"The Reluctant Guest of Honour," Excerpt from Elizabeth Costello (novel):
http://books.guardian.co.uk/extracts/story/0,6761,1027772,00.html

"J. M. Coetzee: Banquet Speech." 10 Dec. 2003. Nobel e-Museum. Nobel Foundation, 2003. 4 Sep. 2004 <http://www.nobel.se/literature/laureates/2003/coetzee-speech-e.html>.

“J(ohn) M(axwell) Coetzee, 1940- .” 2 Oct. 2003.  Contemporary Authors Online.  Gale, 2003.  Gale Literature Resource Center [Online Subscription Database]. The Gale Group, 2004. Central Oregon Community College Library, Bend, OR. 17 August 2004.

Gale Literature Resource Center subscription database articles are available online to COCC students.

Jacobson, Warren. "The Booker Prize." Fall 1997 [sic]. Post Colonial Studies at Emory. Ed. Deepika Bahri (Dept. of English, Emory Univ., Atlanta, GA). 4 Sep. 2004 <http://www.emory.edu/ENGLISH/Bahri/Booker.html>.

Jolly, Rosemary Jane. Colonization, Violence, and Narration in White South African Writing: Andre Brink, Breyten Breytenbach, and J. M. Coetzee. Athens, OH: Ohio Univ. Press, 1996.

Knox-Shaw, Peter. "Dusklands: A Metaphysics of Violence." Commonwealth Novel in English 2.1 (1983): 65-81.

Kossew, Sue. "The Anxiety of Authorship: J. M. Coetzee's The Master of Petersburg (1994) and André Brink's On the Contrary (1993)." English in Africa 23.1 (1986): 67-88.

Kossew, Sue. Pen and Power: A Post-Colonial Reading of J.M. Coetzee and André Brink. Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 1996.

Kossew, Sue. "The Politics of Shame and Redemption in J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace." Research in African Literatures 34.2 (Summer 2003): 155-162.

Full text in .pdf format available to COCC students from EBSCO Academic Search Premier online subscription database

Kossew, Sue, ed. Critical Essays on J. M. Coetzee. Critical Essays on World Literature. New York: G. K. Hall, 1998.

Call No. PR9369.3.C58 Z637 1998 -  available to COCC students from Summit

Lee, Hermione. "The Rest Is Silence." Rev. of Elizabeth Costello, by J. M. Coetzee. Guardian [Manchester, UK] 30 Aug. 2003. Guardian Unlimited Books, Guardian Newspapers, 2004. 31 Aug. 2004 <http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/generalfiction/0,6121,1031735,00.html>.

Kurtz, J. Roger. Rev. of Stranger Shores: Literary Essays 1886-1999, by J. M. Coetzee. World Literature Today 76.2 (Spring 2002): 249. Academic Search Premier (6991882). EBSCOhost. Central Oregon Community College Library, Bend, OR. 6 Sep. 2004.

EBSCO Academic Search Premier subscription database articles are available online to COCC students.

Lehmann-Haupt, Christopher. "Caught in Shifting Values (and Plot)." Rev. of Disgrace, by J. M. Coetzee. Books of the Times. New York Times 11 Nov. 1999. New York Times on the Web, 1999. 31 Aug. 2004 <http://www.nytimes.com/books/99/11/07/daily/111199disgrace-book-review.html>.

Lenta, Margaret. "Autrebiography: J. M. Coetzee's Boyhood and Youth." English in Africa 30.1 (May 2003): 157-169.

Full text in .pdf format available to COCC students from EBSCO Academic Search Premier online subscription database

Lenta, Margaret. "Fictions of the Future." English Academy Review 5 (1988): 133-145.

Lyall, Sarah. "J. M. Coetzee's 'Disgrace' Wins Booker Prize." New York Times 26 Oct. 1999. New York Times on the Web, 1999. 31 Aug. 2004 <http://www.nytimes.com/library/books/10269coetzee-booker.html>.

Maes-Jelinek, Hena. "Ambivalent Clio: J. M. Coetzee's In the Heart of the Country and Wilson Harris's Carnival." Journal of Commonwealth Literature 22.1 (1987): 87-98.

Malan, Rian. "Only the Big Questions." Time 13 Oct. 2003: 80 (1p). Academic Search Premier (10996073). EBSCOhost. Central Oregon Community College Library, Bend, OR. 6 Sep. 2004.

EBSCO Academic Search Premier subscription database articles are available online to COCC students.

Marais, Michael.  “J. M. Coetzee, February 9, 1940- .”  Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 225: South African Writers.  Ed. Paul A. Scanlon.  Detroit: Gale Group, 2000. 131-149. Gale Literature Resource Center [Online Subscription Database]. The Gale Group, 2004. Central Oregon Community College Library, Bend, OR. 17 August 2004. 

Marais, Michael. "Languages of Power: A Story of Reading Michael K/Michael K." English in Africa 16.2 (1989): 31-48.

Marais, Michael. "Places of Pigs: The Tension between Implication and Transcendence in J. M. Coetzee's Age of Iron and The Master of Petersburg." Journal of Commonwealth Literature 31.1 (1996): 83-96.

Martin, Richard G. "Narrative, History, Ideology: A Study of Waiting for the Barbarians and Burger's Daughter." Ariel: A Review of International English Literature 17.3 (July 1986): 3-21.

The Man Booker Prize 2004 [official web site]. 31 Aug. 2004 <http://www.manbookerprize.co.uk/>.

   "The Booker Prize for Fiction was originally set up by Booker plc in 1969 to reward merit, raise the stature of the author in the eyes of the public and encourage an interest in contemporary quality fiction. In April 2002, it was announced that the Man Group had been chosen by the Booker Prize Foundation as the new sponsor of the Booker Prize. The sponsorship will run until 2006 during which time the prize will be known as the Man Booker Prize."
   "The Man Booker International Prize is unique in the world of literature in that it can be won by an author of any nationality, providing that his or her work is available in the English language. It will be awarded every second year. An author can only win the award once."
Source: The Man Booker International Prize 2005 [official web site]. 31 Aug. 2004 <http://www.manbookerinternational.com/intro.html>.

Masoga, Mogomme Alpheus. "Towards Sacrificial-Cleansing Ritual in South Africa: An Indigenous African View of Truth and Reconciliation." Alternation: International Journal for the Study of Southern African Literature and Languages 6.1 (1999). 4 Sep. 2004 <http://sing.reshma.tripod.com/alternation/alternation6_1/14MASOG.htm>.

McCrum, Robert. "The Voice of Africa: Robert McCrum on Nobel Prize-winner JM Coetzee's Timeless Brilliance." The Observer 5 Oct. 2003. Guardian Unlimited Books [Manchester, UK], Guardian Newspapers, 2004. 31 Aug. 2004 <http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/generalfiction/story/0,6000,1055828,00.html>.

McDonald, Peter D. "Disgrace Effects." [Special Issue devoted to Disgrace, by J. M. Coetzee.]  Interventions: The International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 4.3 (Nov. 2002): 321-330.

Full text in .pdf format available to COCC students from EBSCO Academic Search Premier online subscription database

Middlemiss, Perry. "1999 Booker Prize." Perry Middlemiss, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia; 2002. 31 Aug. 2004 <http://www.middlemiss.org/lit/prizes/booker/booker1999.html>.

Moore, John Rees. "Coetzee and the Precarious Lives of People and Animals." Rev. of Disgrace and The Lives of Animals, by J. M. Coetzee. Sewanee Review 109.3 (Summer 2001): 462-474.

Full text in .pdf format available to COCC students from EBSCO Academic Search Premier online subscription database

Moore, John Rees. "J. M. Coetzee and Foe." The Sewanee Review 98.1 (Winter 1990): 152-59. Olsen, Lance. "The Presence of Absence: Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians." Ariel: A Review of International English Literature 16.2 (April 1985): 47-56.

Morphet, Tony. "Reading Coetzee in South Africa." J. M. Coetzee Special Section. World Literature Today 78.1 (Jan.-April 2004): 14-16 (3pp). Academic Search Premier (11810872). EBSCOhost. Central Oregon Community College Library, Bend, OR. 6 Sep. 2004.

EBSCO Academic Search Premier subscription database articles are available online to COCC students.

Morphet, Tony. "Two Interviews with J. M. Coetzee, 1983 and 1987." TriQuarterly 69 (Spring/Summer 1987): 454-464.

Moses, Michael Valdez.  "Solitary Walkers: Rousseau and Coetzee's Life and Times of Michael K." South Atlantic Quarterly 93.1 (1994): 131-156.

Moses, Michael Valdez, ed. The Writings of J. M. Coetzee. Special ed. of The South Atlantic Quarterly '93 [Winter 1994].

“The Nobel Prize in Literature: John Maxwell Coetzee.”  Press Release, 2 Oct. 2003.  The Permanent Secretary, Swedish Academy. Nobel e-Museum. Nobel Foundation, 2004. 21 August 2004 <http://www.nobel.se/literature/laureates/2003/press.html>.

Noguchi, Mai. "Apartheid." Fall 2000. Post Colonial Studies at Emory. Ed. Deepika Bahri (Dept. of English, Emory Univ., Atlanta, GA). 4 Sep. 2004 <http://www.emory.edu/ENGLISH/Bahri/apart.html>.

Olsen, Lance. "The Presence of Absence: Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians." Ariel 16.2 (1985): 47-56.

Pechey, Graham. "Coetzee's Purgatorial Africa: The Case of Disgrace." Editorial. [Special Issue devoted to Disgrace, by J. M. Coetzee.]  Interventions: The International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 4.3 (Nov. 2002): 374-383.

Full text in .pdf format available to COCC students from EBSCO Academic Search Premier online subscription database

Penner, [Dick] Allen Richard. Countries of the Mind: The Fiction of J.M. Coetzee. New York and Westport, CN: Greenwood Press, 1989.

Call No. PR9369.3.C58 Z87 1989 -  available from Summit

Penner, Dick. "J. M. Coetzee's Foe: The Muse, the Absurd, and the Colonial Dilemma." World Literature Written in English 27.2 (Autumn 1987): 207-15.

Penner, Dick. "Sight, Blindness and Double-thought in J. M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians." World Literature Written in English 26.1 (Spring 1986): 34-45.

Post, Robert M. "Oppression in the Fiction of J. M. Coetzee." Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction 27.2 (Winter 1986): 67-77.

Post, Robert M.. "The Noise of Freedom: J. M. Coetzee's Foe." Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 30.3 (Spring 1989): 143-54.

Price, Jonathan. "J. M. Coetzee." Fall 2000. Post Colonial Studies at Emory. Ed. Deepika Bahri (Dept. of English, Emory Univ., Atlanta, GA). 4 Sep. 2004 <http://www.emory.edu/ENGLISH/Bahri/Coetzee.html>.

Regan, Tom, and Martin Rowe. "Animal Rights: What the Nobel Committee Failed to Note." International Herald Tribune 19 Dec. 2003. Common Dreams NewsCenter, 1997-2004. 5 Sep. 2004 <http://www.commondreams.org/views03/1219-11.htm>.

Renders, Luc. "J. M. Coetzee's Michael K: Starving in a Land of Plenty." Literary Gastronomy. Ed. David Bevan. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1988. 95-102.

Rhedin, Folke. "Interview [with J. M. Coetzee]." Kunapipi 6.1 (1984): 6-11.

Rich, Paul. "Apartheid and the Decline of Civilization Idea: An Essay on Nadine Gordimer's July's People and J. M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians." Research in African Literatures 15 (1984): 365-393.

Rich, Paul. "Tradition and Revolt in South African Fiction: The Novels of André Brink, Nadine Gordimer and J. M. Coetzee." Journal of Southern African Studies 9.1 (1982): 54-73.

Roberts, Sheila. "Cinderella's Mothers: J. M. Coetzee's In the Heart of the Country." English in Africa 19.1 (1992): 21-33.

Sanders, Mark. "Disgrace." [Special Issue devoted to Disgrace, by J. M. Coetzee.]  Interventions: The International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 4.3 (Nov. 2002): 363-373.

Full text in .pdf format available to COCC students from EBSCO Academic Search Premier online subscription database

Sarvan, Charles. "Disgrace: A Path to Grace?" J. M. Coetzee Special Section. World Literature Today 78.1 (Jan.-April 2004): 26-29 (4pp). Academic Search Premier (11810875). EBSCOhost. Central Oregon Community College Library, Bend, OR. 6 Sep. 2004.

EBSCO Academic Search Premier subscription database articles are available online to COCC students.

Simpson, David. "Neither Rushdie nor Nobody: J. M. Coetzee on Censorship and Offense." Critical Resources. Pretexts: Literary and Cultural Studies 10.1 (July 2001): 119-128.

Full text in .pdf format available to COCC students from EBSCO Academic Search Premier online subscription database

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. "Theory in the Margin: Coetzee's Foe Reading Defoe's Crusoe/Roxana." English in Africa 17.2 (1990): 1-23.

Swedish Academy. "J. M. Coetzee - Bibliography." 3 May 2004. Nobel e-Museum. Nobel Foundation, 2004. 4 Sep. 2004 <http://www.nobel.se/literature/laureates/2003/coetzee-bibl.html>.

Szalai, Jennifer. "Harvest of a Quiet Eye: J. M. Coetzee and the Art of Lucidity." Harper's Magazine July 2004: 85-89.

Taylor, D. J. "The Castaway: DJ Taylor on JM Coetzee's Intriguing Nobel Acceptance Speech." Guardian 13 Dec. 2003. Guardian Unlimited Books [Manchester, UK], Guardian Newspapers, 2004. 4 Sep. 2004 <http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/generalfiction/story/0,6000,1105841,00.html>.

Thornton, Lawrence. "Apartheid's Last Vicious Gasps." Rev. of Age of Iron, by J. M. Coetzee. New York Times 23 Sept. 1990, Late ed.- Final, sec. 7: 7. New York Times on the Web, 1998. 31 Aug. 2004 <http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/11/02/home/coetzee-iron.html>.

Tiffin, H. M. "J. M. Coetzee: Overview." Contemporary Novelists. 6th ed. Ed. Susan Windisch Brown. St. James Press, 1996. Rpt. Gale Literature Resource Center [Online Subscription Database]. The Gale Group, 2004. Central Oregon Community College Library, Bend, OR. 17 August 2004. 

Full text available to COCC students from Gale Literature Resource Center online subscription database.

Vaughan, Michael. "Literature and Politics: Currents in South African Writing in the Seventies." Journal of Southern African Studies 9.1 (1982): 118-138.

Wade, Jean-Philippe. "The Allegorical Text and History: J. M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians."  Journal of Literary Studies 6.4 (1990): 275-288.

Wästberg, Per. “The Nobel Prize in Literature 2003.”  Presentation Speech, Stockholm Concert Hall.  Nobel e-Museum. Nobel Foundation, Swedish Academy. 2003.  August 21 2004 <http://www.nobel.se/literature/laureates/2003/presentation-speech.html>.

Watson, Stephen. "Colonialism and the Novels of J. M. Coetzee." Research in African Literatures 17.3 (Fall 1986): 370-92.

Watson, Stephen. "Speaking: J. M. Coetzee." [Interview] Speak 1.3 (1978): 21-24.

West, Paul. "The Novelist and the Hangman: When Horror Invades Protocol." Harper's Magazine July 2004: 89+.

Williams, Paul. "Foe: The Story of Silence." English Studies in Africa 31.1 (1988): 33-39.

Wood, W. J. B. "Dusklands and 'The Impregnable Stronghold of the Intellect.'" Theoria 54 (May 1980): 13-23.

Wood, W. J. B. "Waiting for the Barbarians: Two Sides of Imperial Rule and Some Related Considerations." Momentum: On Recent South African Writing. Ed. M. J. Daymond, J. U. Jacobs, and Margaret Lenta. Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press and London: Currey, 1984. 129-140.

Yeoh, Gilbert. "J. M. Coetzee and Samuel Beckett: Ethics, Truth Telling, and Self-Deception." Critique 44.4 (Summer 2003): 331-348 (18pp). Academic Search Premier (10853701). EBSCOhost. Central Oregon Community College Library, Bend, OR. 6 Sep. 2004.

EBSCO Academic Search Premier subscription database articles are available online to COCC students.

Zamora, Lois Parkinson. "Allegories of Power in the Fiction of J. M. Coetzee." Journal of Literary Studies 2.1 (1986): 1-14.

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J. M. Coetzee: Biography:
http://web.cocc.edu/cagatucci/classes/hum211/CoursePack/coetzee.htm

Under construction: Disgrace (1999) Reading Guide

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