AustLit

In this preface, Maaskill states that he 'take the duty of this special edition—in which various hands work with Coetzee’s work—to be an obligation to respond as variously as possible to Coetzee’s generically-various and, to some extent, topographically-various productions, here subject to sounding.' (iv)

'This article argues against Patrick Hayes’s assertion that the principal difference between Samuel Beckett’s and J.M. Coetzee’s writing lies in the former’s solipsism and the latter’s attempt to imagine the ‘good community.’ I demonstrate that the search for the lost self that is thematized in much of Beckett’s fiction is a search for that from which the seeker has been estranged by community. At the same time, I contend that this Beckettian quest is also present in Coetzee’s writing, where it takes the form of a search for the lost, abandoned, or unborn child. The difference, though, is that, in Coetzee’s work, the search for this stranger is inextricably related to the presence of community’s outsider: the foreigner. In order to find the lost child, the seeker has to see the foreigner not as a foreigner, and therefore the bearer of the differences through which community constructs itself, but as a stranger. In other words, an unlimited form of hospitality is required of the seeker. This ethic of hospitality, which is closely related to the notion of waiting in Beckett’s writing, cannot but threaten community since the foreigner can only be received as a stranger by disabling the differences that enable community. In this argument, then, a community is only ‘good’ if it constantly calls itself into question and thereby renders itself incomplete.' (Publication abstract)

'Three recent books by J.M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello (2003), Diary of a Bad Year (2007), and Here and Now (2013), have included extensive expressions of opinion. The wide-ranging discussions in these books cover topics from political philosophy, language, animal rights, and paedophilia to music, food, and sport. There is substantial continuity in the opinions expressed, and the characters or personae expressing these views also have a good deal in common. Nevertheless, these opinions are expressed in three explicitly different personae. With each of these books the personae are progressively more closely identifiable with Coetzee himself. Elizabeth Costello, in the book of that name, is a character who crosses gender and national boundaries from her creator. JC in Diary of a Bad Year shares at least some biographical circumstances with Coetzee—land of birth, gender, initials, occupation, for example. Then, in Here and Now, we are presented with what purports transparently to be the author J.M. Coetzee’s own voice in correspondence with Paul Auster. How do I, as a reader and a critic, negotiate this progression? Just how much license does the apparently closer correspondence between author and writing persona give me to believe that I know what Coetzee ‘really’ thinks or believes?' (Publication abstract)

'This article interrogates the curious dismissal of madness from the critical landscape surrounding J. M. Coetzee’s In the Heart of the Country, and makes suggestions concerning how madness works in the novel and why—given certain critical and historical pressures—it has been persistently sidelined. An analysis of the novel in light of Coetzee’s scholarship on Samuel Beckett suggests that Magda’s discourse, like those of many Beckettian narrators, follows patterns of affirmation and auto-negation, constituting a fiction of what Coetzee calls “net zero.” In particular, Magda extends this pattern to the taking on and casting off of identities, perhaps in the style of the hermit crab she puts forward as an image of herself. An intertextual examination of the semantic and rhetorical range of madness as it appears in Coetzee’s other fiction and scholarship reveals that madness, for Coetzee, consistently denotes: on the one hand, a contagious force moving throughout a social body, and on the other hand, the labor of writing under the threat of illegibility—a threat conditioned in large part by the madness of the social body. By infecting the writer who might record its workings in history and thereby inhibiting or distorting that record, madness likewise appears in historical record as “net zero.” Thus, rather than simply being mad, Magda’s relationship with madness is emblematic of the (dis)appearance of madness in and from history.' (Publication abstract)

'Charles Davis’s photo-essay offers a series of magnificent portraits presenting, at their photographic centre, the astonishingly beautiful Snowy Mountain region of southern New South Wales.' (Publication summary)

'This essay pursues an articulation of the relation between the personal and impersonal as they relate to the artistic work of writing, particularly as seen in the work of South African author J.M. Coetzee. Taking the critical theory of Maurice Blanchot as its touchstone on im-personal-ity, the essay aims to uncover how Coetzee’s writing simultaneously negotiates and foregrounds a middle ground between the personal and impersonal as well as between persons and personalities, which issues in the construction of works of art that are personally impersonal in a way that distinguishes authors like Coetzee and Blanchot from others who are, perhaps, more interested in their own personal expression and ‘celebrity.’ Starting with an analysis of these matters as they appear in his memoir-novels, this essay ultimately pursues the consummation of this impersonal discourse and the work of writing in Coetzee’s most recent novel, The Childhood of Jesus (2013).' (Publication abstract)

'In the two essays “The Philosophers and the Animals” and “The Poets and the Animals” (in The Lives of Animals, 1999) J.M. Coetzee lets Elizabeth Costello urge us to use our sympathetic imagination in order to access the experience of others—in particular, animals—and engage with them empathetically. Coetzee’s fiction illustrates how the use of the sympathetic imagination might evoke empathy in the reader. Narrative structure and the character’s mode of introspection engage the reader’s empathy through an ambivalent process of distancing and approximation, as Fritz Breithaupt puts forward in his narrative theory of empathy (Kulturen der Empathie, 2009). The sympathetic imagination and the complementary notion of embodiment feature prominently in Coetzee’s fictional discourse and resonate with neuroscience’s research on mirror neurons and their relation to empathy.' (Publication abstract)

'This essay considers the title of J.M. Coetzee’s Summertime from the perspective of a remark Coetzee makes in Doubling the Point that ‘all writing is autobiographical,’ and posits a concept of ‘titular space’ tropologically exceeding the ‘reality effect’ envisaged by Roland Barthes.' (Publication summary)