AustLit

'J. M. Coetzee, one of the most important writers alive today, has turned eighty. A valuable book of diverse writings and artwork, assembled by Dorothy Driver, Coetzee’s life-companion of more than forty years, records the significance of this event. The volume presents a homage to a major writer by his friends—friends who have formed close associations with Coetzee over the course of a long life spent in various locations: the South Africa of Coetzee’s birth, first and foremost, but also the Australia to which Coetzee emigrated with Driver in 2002 and the Argentina that played host to several visits between 2014 and 2017. Mention should also be made of Coetzee’s regular extended stays at the University of Chicago between the mid-1990s and 2003. Not only did these stays allow the writer to forge a durable alliance with that institution and its colleagues (two of whom are represented in this volume); they also serve as a reminder of the importance of the academy in Coetzee’s writing as a whole. Several of those contributing to this volume, accordingly, are academics working at a range of institutions across the world. The coming together, indeed, of thirty-seven academic writers and creative artists in an alphabetically arranged compendium of essayistic reflection, stories, poems, and visual composition speaks to the wide-ranging, polyglot influences in which Coetzee’s writing is steeped and on which in so many ways it depends.' (Introduction)

'Beyond the Ancient Quarrel: Literature, philosophy and J.M. Coetzee is a new collection of essays on J.M. Coetzee, perhaps the most important author of imaginative literature in the world today. Unifying the diverse strands of argument animating this thoughtful volume, the book’s editors, noted Coetzee scholars Patrick Hayes and Jan Wilm, link the aims of the collection to the ‘ancient quarrel’ between philosophy and literature in Greek antiquity. In their view, Coetzee’s writing can be taken not only to re-examine this quarrel and the way it was settled (in favour of philosophy and against literature in Plato’s Republic), but also, and more importantly, to break with the uneasy truce that has been deemed to govern intellectual life ever since.' (Introduction)

'J.M. Coetzee is perhaps the most critically acclaimed bestselling author of imaginative fiction writing in English today. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003 and is the first writer to have been awarded two Booker Prizes. The present volume makes critical views of this important writer accessible to the general reader as well as the scholar, discussing Coetzee's main works in chronological order and introducing the dominant themes in the academic discussion of his oeuvre. It also highlights the author's exceptionally nuanced approach to writing as both an exacting craft and a challenging moral-ethical undertaking. It discusses the author's complex relation to apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa, the land of his birth, and evaluates his complicated responses to the literary canon. He emerges as both a modernist and a highly self-aware post modernist, a champion of the truths of a literary enterprise conducted unrelentingly in the mode of self-confession.' (Publisher's summary)