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Critical Perspectives on J.M. Coetzee is one of the first collections of critical essays on this major contemporary writer. The essays, written by an international cast of contributors, adopt a variety of approaches to Coetzee's often controversial work, taking care to place that work within its wider cultural context. Contributions include essays of more general import, ranging across Coetzee's oeuvre, as well as essays that analyse in more detail individual Coetzee novels. The collection also includes a preface by Coetzee's fellow South African, the internationally acclaimed writer Nadine Gordimer. ... Read more

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Since the publication of his first novel in 1974, J. M. Coetzee has attained a reputation as one of the world's most respected novelists. The demand for his works is related to the world's interest in the politics, literature, culture, and society of South Africa. However, Coetzee's fictions remain significant, according to Penner, apart from their South African context, because of their artistry and because they transform urgent societal concerns into more enduring questions regarding colonialism and the relationships of mastery and servitude between cultures and individuals. ... Read more

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This work draws on a wide range of theoretical ideas and approaches to illuminate Coetzee's texts including: deconstruction and the 'school of singularity', ethics and power, gender studies, queer theory, issues surrounding the body and animal rights.Nobel Laureate and the first author to win the Booker Prize twice, J.M. Coetzee is perhaps the world's leading living novelist writing in English. Including an international roster of world leading critics and novelists, and drawing on new research, this innovative book analyses the whole range of Coetzee's work, from his most recent novels through his memoirs and critical writing. It offers a range of perspectives on his relationship with the historical, political, cultural and social context of South Africa. It also contextualises Coetzee's work in relation to his literary influences, colonial and post-colonial history, the Holocaust and colonial genocides, the 'politics' and meaning of the Nobel prize in South Africa and Coetzee's very public move from South Africa to Australia.Including a major unpublished essay by leading South African novelist Andre Brink, this book offers the most up-to-date study of Coetzee's work currently available. ... Read more

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Combining postcolonial, performance, gender-based and environmental theory, this interdisciplinary study examines the ways in which Nobel Prize winning author J.M. Coetzee displaces both the narrative and authorial voice in his works of fiction. Due to its interdisciplinary and accessible range, the book has broad academic appeal in the fields of not only literary studies, but also in the realm of performance and gender studies. It also contributes towards bridging a gap created by the increased interest in Coetzee's work as a result of his Nobel Prize award and the relative dearth of single author studies on Coetzee. Concerned with the ethical responsibility of the individual to the 'other', the book situates Coetzee's writing within various and seemingly disparate contexts - particularly the environmental and performative - which other studies are less overtly concerned with. Its attention to the performative nature of his work is something unique in Coetzee studies and through the analysis of imagined and performative animal interiority, the work also bridges two distinct realms that have hitherto lacked cross disciplinary anaylsis - the postcolonial and the ecocritical. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Invaluable resource
Laura Wright's study is an interdisciplinary examination - combining ethical, postcolonial, performance, gender-based, and environmental theory - of the ways that 2003 Nobel Prize winning South African novelist J. M. Coetzee, primarily through his voicing of a female subject position and his presentation of a voiceless subjectivity, the animal, displaces both the narrative and authorial voice in his works of fiction. Coetzee's work remains outside of conventional notions of genre by virtue of the free indirect discourse that characterizes many of his third-person narrated texts that feature male protagonists (Life & Times of Michael K, The Master of Petersburg, and Disgrace), various and differing first-person narrative accounts of the same story (Dusklands, In the Heart of the Country), the use of female narrators and female narrative personas (Age of Iron, The Lives of Animals), and unlocatable, ahistorical contexts (Waiting for the Barbarians).She argues that via such displacement Coetzee writes dialogically, in the Bahktinian sense, as an author whose work performs various positions rather than maintains an internal, controlling, and monologic subjectivity.Therefore, Coetzee's texts, like his character of Michael K, position themselves "out of all the camps at the same time."Such destabilization opens up a space for my examination of the metafictional and postmodern nature of Coetzee's writing as performative narratives that allow for interplay between character, audience, and author.If there is any unifying aspect of Coetzee's writing, she argues, it is his relentless examination - and his characters' continuous pursuit - of imagined identification with the other, in the form of not only the black characters who are often silent in his texts and the white women who often narrate, but also in the form of animals, an issue he pursues most overtly in is 1997-98 Princeton Tanner Lectures, The Lives of Animals.

Dr. Wright knows it
I'm currently writing my disseration on J. M. Coetzee, and I found Dr. Wright's book to be an invaluable resource.This text is particularly useful in terms of its discussions of animals in Coetzee's works and with regard to Coetzee's female narrators -- I would classify this research as environmental, animal-rights, feminist, and postcolonial.All in all, a thorough study and a pleasure to read: her writing is scholarly, but it's also lyrical and accessible. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

A compelling read, and re-read
This is such a tricky book that short reviews can't really capture it, even if the premise is simple: Elizabeth Costello goes around the world on the celebrity-writer circuit delivering lectures.Poorly.Those lectures are not cryptic but they are challenging and frequently original; the stories around the lectures are well-observed and clever; and it ends with a series of surprises.

It is not a coincidence that Ulysses is evoked on the first page.Give it a chance: Elizabeth Costello will actually become more and more interesting, and the puzzles, the tricks, the insinuations of the novel build up around those lectures - however poorly they are delivered.

Certainly expected more
I really expected more from Coetzee, whom I had never read before picking up this book.I saw after finishing the book that it was originally published as separate stories or vignettes, and I'm not surprised.The title character spends all of her time giving speeches, which is strange for a novel--you think you will get a plot, but you just get lectured to.The writing is good, spare and cogent, but the book does not hang together well enough to be a novel, in my opinion.The best chapter, which is the last, has little or nothing to do with the prior chapters. ... Read more

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Word count: 7846. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

An interesting approach to Coetzee's work
The book makes use of a deconstructive theoretical basis and narrative analysis to refute previous claims both within the critical reception of J.M. Coetzee's works and within the field of post-colonial studies. It should be of interest to both students and professors who are looking for an original approach to one of the most complex and critically acclaimed authors of our time. The text is also very precise and easy to understand. The price is a little bit steep but it is definitely worth it! ... Read more

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What's on the minds of African writers? The South African Chapter of PEN International asked the question, and this volume of collected works holds the answer.More than 800 pieces of new writing from across the continent flowed in once the call for entries was made for the PEN/Studzinski Literary Award. This collection contains the 34 short stories eventually selected, including the prize-winners and those receiving honourable mentions from final judge JM Coetzee.This is a contemporary African reading journey that will take you from Algeria to Zimbabwe, with stops along the way in Nigeria, Cameroon, Uganda, Kenya, Zambia, Mauritius, Botswana, Mozambique, and South Africa. The writers are young and old, established and unpublished; the subject matter as diverse as Africa itself. ... Read more

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This digital document is an article from Africa: An Encyclopedia for Students, brought to you by Gale®, a part of Cengage Learning, a world leader in e-research and educational publishing for libraries, schools and businesses.The length of the article is 204 words.The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase.You can view it with any web browser.Based on the scholarship in the acclaimed Encyclopedia of Africa, this work presents Africa, from Egypt to Cape Town and from prehistoric times to the present day. This set spans many disciplines, covering animals, foods, holidays and festivals, tribal groups, ecology, music and art, trade and economy, geography, religion, folklore, and fossil and skeletal discoveries. ... Read more