In her thoroughgoing account of J. M. Coetzee's literary career, Jane Poyner illuminates the author's life-long engagement with the problems of colonialism and 'postcolonialism'. How successful has this member of a white South African academic elite been in accommodating his various roles as author, public intellectual, and citizen? What are the ethics of writing fiction within postcolonial and, more specifically, South African contexts? From "Dusklands" to "Disgrace" and from "Waiting for the Barbarians" to "Elizabeth Costello", Poyner traces how Coetzee rehearses and revises his understanding of the ethics of intellectualism in parallel with the emergence of the 'new South Africa'. She contends that Coetzee not only introduces a singularly modernist reading of the South African situation to the field of postcolonial studies but also makes postcolonial interventions into the modernist tradition by reworking novels of this literary movement. In addition, she is attentive to the ways his writing reflects Coetzee's evolving views of the writer's proper role with respect to the changing ethical demands of contemporary political life.  Theoretically sophisticated and accessibly written, her book is a major contribution to our understanding of the Nobel Laureate and to postcolonial studies.

J. M. Coetzee and the Paradox of Postcolonial Authorship PDF

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