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‘Anti‐illusionism is, I suspect, only a marking of time, a phase of recuperation, in the history of the novel. The question is, what next?’ (J. M. Coetzee). Placing Coetzee in relation to the long tradition of the novel, from Beckett, Kafka, and Dostoevsky to Richardson, Defoe, and Cervantes, this book argues that Coetzee's significance lies in the acuity with which he has explored the resources of that tradition as part of a sustained attempt to rethink the relationship between writing and politics. For Coetzee questions about the future of the novel are closely related to what it means to write after Beckett, and this book describes and evaluates the ways in which his fiction draws upon aspects of modernist writing to address the major questions posed by late twentieth‐century politics. The unsettling comic energy of Beckett's prose, especially its insistent complication of tone and register, was, as Coetzee put it, nothing less than ‘a secret…that I wanted to make my own’, and Patrick Hayes brings to the fore the little‐discussed comedic dimension of Coetzee's writing. Opening up a range of new approaches to this major contemporary author, J. M. Coetzee and the Novel argues that it is only by paying especially close attention to the experience of reading Coetzee's complex and nuanced fiction that its important impact on longstanding questions about identity, community, and the nature of political modernity can be appreciated.

This book sets out to articulate a new theory and textual practice of the relation between literary reception and embodiment by arguing that certain modern literary texts have apocalyptic futures. Rather than claim that great writers have clairvoyant powers, it examines the ways in which a text incorporates an apocalyptic event—and marked or mutilated bodies—into its future reception. The book is thus concerned with the way in which apocalyptic works solicit their future receptions. Deploying the double register of “marks” to show how a text both codes and targets mutilated bodies, the book focuses on how these bodies are incorporated into texts by Kafka, Conrad, Coetzee, and Spiegelman. Situating “In the Penal Colony” in relation to the Holocaust, Heart of Darkness to the Rwandan genocide, and Waiting for the Barbarians to the revelations of torture in apartheid South Africa and contemporary Iraq, it argues for the ethical and political importance of reading these literary works' “apocalyptic futures” in our own urgent and perilous situations. The book concludes with a reading of Spiegelman's Maus that offers a messianic counter-time to the law of apocalyptic incorporation.

The book proceeds from a central contemporary paradox. Never before have we been confronted by such dizzying forms of multiplicity, while at the same time facing still powerful appeals to singularity in matters of location and identity. The question arises as to how we negotiate the relation between the two — whether we can fashion new understandings of self and place in a disparate and uneven world. Here the relevant problem is not whether boundaries exist, but the nature of the boundaries we construct. In this light the book takes up the idea of a ‘grammar of identity’, considering notions of the generative, the metonymic, the transitive and navigational as ways of fashioning a sense of both self and place. In doing so, it explores the fiction of some of the major writers of the 20th and 21st centuries, including Joseph Conrad, Caryl Phillips, Salman Rushdie, Jean Rhys, W. G. Sebald, Nadine Gordimer, and J. M. Coetzee. Beyond the binaries of the colonial and postcolonial, the modern and postmodern, these are writers for whom questions of self and boundary have been central. If they present no form of utopia, they have described the space and time of our history, redefining what we mean by the transnational, and by transnational fiction.

This book contributes to the study of South African literature, offering readings of writers such as Coetzee, Gordimer, Fugard, Tlali, and Mda. Focusing on the relationship between place, subjectivity, and literary form, the study examines our understanding of apartheid as a geographical form of control, and of its imagined and actual transformation.

Focusing on a moment and a source in the 19th century, this book ponders the question: what is a classic? This question is, by virtue of its insistent recurrence, itself a classic question that returns to haunt us. It provided the title of a text for French critic Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve in 1850 (‘Qu'est-ce qu'un classique?’), as it did in the 20th century for T.S. Eliot and John Coetzee. Centring on Sainte-Beuve in his 19th-century context, this book's inquiry takes us historically to many places (antiquity, the middle ages, the 17th and 18th as well as the 19th and early 20th centuries). The book also provides an intellectual history that travels across multiple disciplinary territories (in addition to literary criticism and literary history, classical studies, comparative philology, historiography and political thought). Against this background, this book maps the evolution of Sainte-Beuve's thought from an initially cosmopolitan conception of the classic (close in spirit to Goethe's notion of Weltliteratur) to an increasingly nationalist conception, with a strong emphasis on the heritage of Latinity and France as its principal legatee. The final chapter deals with this appropriation and ends with a question about Sainte-Beuve's original question: in the light of this bleak history, perhaps the time has come to dispense with the term ‘classic’ altogether.

In contemporary race and sexuality studies, the topic of animality emerges almost exclusively in order to index the dehumanization that makes discrimination possible. Bestial Traces argues that a more fundamental disavowal of human animality conditions the bestialization of racial and sexual minorities. Hence, when conservative politicians equate homosexuality with bestiality, they betray an anxious effort to deny the animality inherent in all sexuality. Focusing on literary texts by Edgar Allan Poe, Joel Chandler Harris, Richard Wright, Philip Roth, and J. M. Coetzee, together with philosophical texts by Derrida, Heidegger, Agamben, Freud, and Nietzsche, Peterson maintains that the representation of social and political others as animals can be mitigated but never finally abolished. All forms of belonging inevitably exclude some others as “beasts.” Though one might argue that absolute political equality and inclusion remain desirable, even if ultimately unattainable, ideals, Bestial Traces shows that, by maintaining such principles, we exacerbate rather than ameliorate violence because we fail to confront how discrimination and exclusion condition all social relations.

This book explores contemporary South African culture as a test case for the achievement of democracy by constitutional means in the wake of prolonged and violent conflict, and addresses ethical issues normally approached from within the discourses of law, the social sciences, and health sciences, through narrative analysis. It draws from and juxtaposes narratives of profoundly different kinds to make its point: fictional narratives, such as the work of Nobel laureate J. M. Coetzee; public testimony, such as that of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and Jacob Zuma's (the former Deputy President's) 2006 trial on charges of rape; and personal testimony, drawn from interviews undertaken by the author over the past ten years in South Africa. These narratives are analysed in order to demonstrate the different ways in which they illuminate the cultural ‘state of the nation’: ways that elude descriptions of South African subjects undertaken from within discourses which have a historical tendency to ignore cultural dimensions of lived experience and their material particularity. The implications of these lived experiences of culture are underlined by the book's focus on the violation of human rights as comprising practices that are simultaneously discursive and material. Cases of such violations, all drawn from the South African context, include humans' use of non-human animals as instruments of violence against other humans; the constructed marginalisation and vulnerability of women and children; and the practice of stigma in the context of the HIV/AIDS epidemic.

As literary modernism was emerging in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a number of its most important figures and precursors began to talk about their own writing as a kind of starvation. The Art of Hunger: Aesthetic Autonomy and the Afterlives of Modernism uses this trope as a lens through which to examine contemporary literature’s engagement with modernism, arguing that hunger offers a way of grappling with the fate of aesthetic autonomy through modernism’s late twentieth-century afterlives. The art of hunger appears at moments where aesthetic autonomy enters a period of crisis, and in this context, the writers examined here develop an alternate theory of aesthetic autonomy, which imagines art not as a conduit for freedom, but rather as an enactment of unfreedom. This book traces this theme from the origins of modernism to the end of the twentieth century, focusing particularly on three authors who redeploy the modernist art of hunger as a response to key moments in the history of modernist aesthetic autonomy’s delegitimization: Samuel Beckett in post-Vichy France; Paul Auster in post-1968 Paris and New York; and J. M. Coetzee in late apartheid South Africa. Combining historical analysis of these literary fields with close readings of individual texts, and drawing extensively on new archival research, this book offers a counter-history of modernism’s post-World War II reception and a new theory of aesthetic autonomy as a practice of unfreedom.

In Plato’s Republic Socrates spoke of an ‘ancient quarrel’ between literature and philosophy, which he offered to resolve by banning the poets from his ideal city. Few philosophers have taken Socrates at his word, and there has emerged a long tradition that has sought to value literature chiefly as a useful supplement to philosophical reasoning. The fiction of J. M. Coetzee makes a striking challenge to this tradition. While his writing has frequently engaged philosophical subjects in explicit ways, it has done so with an emphasis on the dissonance between literary expression and philosophical reasoning. And while Coetzee has often overtly engaged with academic literary theory, his fiction has done so in a way that has tended to disorient rather than affirm those same theories, wrong-footing the normal processes of literary interpretation. The present collection gathers together a range of thinkers from both philosophy and literary theory to reflect upon the challenge Coetzee has made to their respective disciplines, and to the disciplinary distinctions at stake in the ‘ancient quarrel’. Coetzee’s fiction is used to explore questions about the boundaries between literature, philosophy, and literary criticism; the relationship between literature, theology, and post-secularism; the particular ways in which literature engages reality; how literature interacts with the philosophies of language, action, subjectivity, and ethics; and the institutions that govern the distinctions between literature and philosophy. It will be of importance not only to readers of Coetzee, but to anyone interested in the ancient quarrel itself.

The five essays in this book investigate a key work early in the careers of V.S. Naipaul, Alice Munro, J.M. Coetzee, Mavis Gallant and William Trevor. Each of these major writers of fiction found what they variously called ‘the writing voice’, ‘the voice in my head’, ‘the voice of the mind’ ‘[my] own voice’, or a ‘true voice’. Their mature achievement as artists depended on that earlier period of creative synthesis that led to an unprecedented kind of articulation. The circumstances of creation are reconstructed for Naipaul’s writing of Miguel Street, Coetzee’s Dusklands, Gallant’s Green Water, Green Sky, Trevor’s Mrs Eckdorf in O’Neill’s Hotel and related stories, and for certain stories by Alice Munro in Dance of the Happy Shades and Lives of Girls and Women. Each essay is focused on illuminating how and why the particular work marked a crucial turning point. In a sense, what followed, what grew out of this work, provides as much insight as what came before. The later autobiographical essays and fictions of Naipaul and Coetzee, and occasional interviews and essays by Munro, Trevor, and Gallant illuminate the convergence of needs and aesthetic ends in each case. Many of these writers refer to instinct, to curiosity, and to writing as a site of discovery, as if their trust in hidden processes is key. Using biographical and literary critical means, the essays bring the reader close to such a process. Even if there cannot be definitive conclusions, it intrigues many readers and, in particular, beginning writers. The writers’ own expression, ‘finding a voice’, provides an opening for understanding this process.