AustLit

'J.M. Coetzee is best known for winning the Nobel Prize for literature on the basis of writing about his South African homeland. He is also famous for his literary configuring of ethics in relation to human-animal relationships. Coetzee is now an Australian citizen. This chapter provides a reading of the international travels of author, implied author, character and text, with a central interest in the relation between appropriation and negotiations of a transnational identity. Australian woman Elizabeth Costello (lecturing abroad on animal rights) reappears in the regional space of Adelaide, making Elizabeth Costello, Slow Man and subsequent books textual spaces in which Coetzee wrestles with the enigmas of migration, the gaps in history and the ‘masquerade’ that is appropriation of ‘other’ identities. The chapter arises from transnational knowledge transfers, its authors being part of the growth of Australian Studies in India and beyond.'

Source: Abstract.

'This chapter discusses the gerontological implications of amputation and their influence on self-understanding in J.M. Coetzee’s Slow Man (2005). It considers the ways in which Paul Rayment’s response to the amputation of his leg following a cycling accident highlights the complex entanglements of age, masculinity, and the need for human connection. The chapter argues that Paul’s surgery effectively inaugurates his senescence, thereby casting him suddenly and irrevocably into the margins of Australian society. Emotionally unstrung and keenly aware of his mortality, Paul increasingly associates the loss of his leg with the loss of opportunities to establish a legacy. Ultimately, Coetzee’s novel shows how the acceptance of an altered body can enable the individual to come to terms with broader existential concerns.'

Source: Abstract.

'The prospect of death is one of J. M. Coetzee’s central and enduring concerns. As David Attwell observes in his biography, ‘The most trenchant of the purposes of Coetzee’s metafiction . . . is that it is a means whereby he challenges himself with sharply existential questions’. My claim in this essay is that Coetzee uses the act of writing existentially to orient himself and his readers to the prospect of death. I argue that Coetzee treats the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice as a story about how to deal with the prospect of death. What seems to terrify the Coetzeean protagonist is the thought of the absolute solitariness of death. I call this the curse of Eurydice. Eurydice’s fate in the myth is to be left alone in the Underworld, dying for a second time after her impatient lover turns to gaze at her before they have safely reached the surface of the earth. To take Eurydice’s point of view in the story is to begin to glimpse the solitariness of death. One of the roles of women in Coetzee’s fiction, I suggest, is to mitigate the male character’s fear of this solitariness by conducting him to the threshold of death, but no further.'  (Publication abstract)