SOURCE: "Dream Topographies: J. M. Coetzee and the South African Pastoral," in South Atlantic Quarterly, Vol. 93, No. 1, Winter, 1994, pp. 33-58.

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, but rather "atopian," embodying a feeling of constant displacement.

In his recent edition of essays by and interviews with J. M. Coetzee, David Attwell notes that Coetzee's return to South Africa in 1976, and his second novel, In the Heart of the Country, marked the emergence of a new concern with place in his work. This concern has, in fact, been an enduring one for Coetzee: his criticism and fiction have been profoundly affected by an interest in such geographically or topographically defined genres as the exploration narrative and the pastoral, as well as in such politically significant spaces...