AustLit

"This article considers the publication of two excerpts from J.M. Coetzee's 2005 novel, Slow man. The first, appearing as "The blow" in The New Yorker magazine, is a silently edited version of the first fourteen chapters of the novel, which makes considerable stylistic changes, as well as transforming the text to perform as an autonomous piece of short fiction. The article considers both the context of its publication - Coetzee's first appearance in the magazine - as well as the symbolic and suggestive absences left by the magazine's editorial interventions. The second excerpt, in Bloomsbury's New beginnings charitable anthology (benefiting the Indian Ocean Tsunami Earthquake Charities), suggests the continued workings of Coetzee's acute awareness of the importance of place, as well as his investment in Australia (his home since 2002) and the larger Australasian region. Both cases offer suggestive instances of the placement of Coetzee's work as (arguably no-longer) "South African" cultural texts, at large in, and subject to the demands of, constructions of high art in global mediascapes. (47)

"This review essay examines the prevalent critical tendency to assign teleological labels to JM Coetzee's work, arguing that any attempt to categorise the notoriously publicity-shy Coetzee as a "public intellectual" should take into account the fact that Coetzee has always had to defend his own heterodox literary faith against more powerful orthodoxies. The article traces Coetzee's abiding preoccupation with literary form by examining the inbuilt hermeneutic reflex in his fiction and the often ambiguous public response in South Africa to his work. This formal preoccupation is evident not only in Coetzee's novels, which seem to describe a movement from metafiction to a greater degree of realism, but also in his critical opinions on other authors, which in turn throw light on Coetzee's own writerly aesthetic." (60)