Review of The Novel: A Biography

Journal of Modern Literature, 2006

Literary Studies, 2016

J.M Coetzee’s Disgrace is a portrayal of characters in a social context of South Africa where the writer himself was brought up. It throws light on the new social milieu of post apartheid society where Lucy, a white is raped by a black African. She seems to accept this heinous deed with an ease by giving it a historical blend. She understands her rape as a black’s way of taking revenge for what whites have treated the blacks in the past. She considers it different from the universal concept of rape as a forceful sex. By making the blacks raping the white woman, Coetzee seems to be rewriting the African history and in this he dismantles the black/white dichotomy. So, I contend to carry out that Disgrace being a highly paradoxical and contradictory novel presents a world dying without hope and fear. It exposes the intellectual insecurity in South Africa which proves to be a threat to white man’s stability and culture.

Studia Neophilologica

In 1999 I wrote a review of Coetzee's novel "Disgrace" for the "Mail & Guardian" paper in South Africa. In the past year I have taught seminars on the work at the University of Leeds and at Berkeley, and have been prompted to some new considerations. I don't wish to write a full paper on the work, because I feel the review articulated much of my thinking about the novel. Nonetheless, I would wish to point out that the review was edited in publication, and is at points rather compressed. I no longer have access to that piece as originally written, and so choose to leave it as it was when published, in 1999. What is attached here are some additional notes on my recent thinking, along with the original review.

Cambridge University Press

The Scriblerian and the Kit-Cats, 2010

2010

This essay discusses two of Coetzee’s best-known works in academic circles: both appear widely on university syllabi and offer students a chance to engage with debates on authorship, intertextuality, and canonicity. Beginning with a discussion of the reception histories of these two novels, the essay charts the ways in which Coetzee’s fiction is consumed locally and globally and ask questions not only about the politics of writing, but also the ethics of reading (see Attwell 1993; Huggan 2001; Attridge 2005; and Easton in Morrison & Watkins (eds), 2006). When Foe was published in 1986 at the height of State of Emergency South Africa, for example, it caused a stir for its apparent remoteness from the South African situation (as the reviewer Harriett Gilbert asked: 'Postmodern narratives while Soweto burns?'). When Disgrace appeared in 1999, it caused great consternation for its ‘bleak’ representation of the ‘new’ South Africa – not just in reviews, but also in Government quar...