AustLit
The material on this page is available to AustLit subscribers. If you are a subscriber or are from a subscribing organisation, please log in to gain full access. To explore options for subscribing to this unique teaching, research, and publishing resource for Australian culture and storytelling, please contact us or find out more.
Latest Issues
AbstractHistoryArchive Description
Anyone who has read J.M. Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year (2007) will vividly recall the character Alan – annoyingly brash, unethical, self-serving and sexist; one of a new generation of tech-savvy investment consultants. For British academic, literary critic, and writer Andrew Gibson, in this new study of Coetzee, these are among the typical traits of neoliberal individualism that Coetzee’s body of writing resists and critiques. Gibson characterises contemporary global neoliberalism as having led not just to the impoverishment of modern culture but to a lack of planetary care, resulting in climate change, precarity, and depleted resources. The book’s dustjacket brings these issues closer to home; it features an apocalyptic image of the thick orange smoke from the 2019 bushfires at the New South Wales coastal town of – appropriately – Eden. (Gibson was in Australia at this time as a Visiting Professor at the J.M. Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice in Adelaide.) (Introduction)
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Last amended 13 Mar 2023 13:15:23
22-23
https://www.australianbookreview.com.au/abr-online/archive/2023/march-2023-no-451/987-march-2023-no-451/10086-sue-kossew-reviews-j-m-coetzee-and-neoliberal-culture-by-andrew-gibson
An Edgy Affair J.M. Coetzee’s ‘especial Form of Dissidence’
Australian Book Review