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...
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"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...
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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...
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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...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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 ...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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J. M. Coetzee
J. M. Coetzee
J(ohn) M(ichael) Coetzee
