Everything you need to understand or teach
John Maxwell Coetzee.
Products may contain comprehensive summaries, analysis, notes, articles, essays,
lesson plans and more. See below for details on what is included.
J. M. Coetzee (born 1940) was a white South African novelist whose writings reflected strong anti-imperialist sentiments.John M. Coetzee, the son of a sheep farmer, was born in Cape Town in 1940 and w...
Read more
"When some men suffer unjustly . . . it is the fate of those who witness their suffering to suffer the shame of it." This observation by the Magistrate in J. M. Coetzee's 1980 novel, Waiting for the B...
Read more
J. M. Coetzee published his first novel, Dusklands , in 1974 and since then has become one of South Africa's leading writers. As the many literary awards he has received testify, however, his reputati...
Read more
In the following essay, Easton suggests that Coetzee places his novels in settings other than South Africa in order to symbolically emphasize himself as a "regional" writer, highlighting...
Read more
In the following interview, Coetzee discusses his book Giving Offense and his position on key issues in the debate on censorship.
J. M. Coetzee's new book, Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship ...
Read more
In the following review, Bayles praises Coetzee's approach to questions of censorship in Giving Offense.
"Of all the pathologies," J. M. Coetzee writes, "paranoia has been ...
Read more
In the following review, Kakutani discusses the early elements of Coetzee's life, as described in Boyhood, that led to his later writing career.
Though Boyhood has the stylized, fablelike quali...
Read more
In the following essay, Gardiner explores the ways in which Coetzee's novella "The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee" resembles Daniel Defoe's novel Robinson Crusoe in its textu...
Read more
In the following essay, Wright examines Coetzee's fiction as representative of a hostile colonial act in itself.
The settings of J. M. Coetzee's five novels are, at first glance, unusual...
Read more
In the following essay, Bishop questions the veracity of the authorial voice in postcolonial literature written in English and pinpoints Foe as a successful example of this questioning in a textual co...
Read more
In the following review, Cohen praises White Writing as a valuable addition to the study of post-colonial and post-revolutionary South African culture, although he finds in many of the essays a ...
Read more
In the following essay, Marais argues "that J. M. Coetzee's novella 'The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee' … suggests as much about the ethnocentricity of early South Af...
Read more
In the following essay, Barnard examines the significance of place in Coetzee's novels and critical essays, arguing that his settings are not dystopian, as has been suggested by some critics, b...
Read more
Critical Essay by Sheila Roberts
Three generations of writers, white and black, have tried to arouse South Africans to a recognition of what they saw as a growing spiritual and moral aridity and a tig...
Read more
Critical Essay by Peter La Salle
[Dusklands] includes two separate pieces of novella length—"The Vietnam Project" and "The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee." The former ...
Read more
In the following essay, Lenta discusses Coetzee's life, career, awards and recognition, and overall body of work, while also examining the era in which Coetzee wrote and the critical reception ...
Read more
J. M. Coetzee
J. M. Coetzee
J(ohn) M(ichael) Coetzee
Critical Essay by T. Kai Norris Easton
