AustLit

'This study traces, in J.M. Coetzee's fictional and non-fictional production, an imaginative and intellectual masterplot deriving from Coetzee's perception of European presence in (South) Africa as having its origin in an act of illegitimate penetration and fraudulent visitation. In Coetzee's novels, the historical and political problem of a hostile occupation and unfair distribution of the land finds a correspondence in the domestic space of house and farm, and the uneasy cohabitation of its occupants, along with the relation between hosts and guests. The seminal dimension of the categories of penetration and visitation is highlighted, as these are shown to operate not only on a spatial level but also on an epistemological, physical, psychological, hermeneutic, metafictional and ethical one: we encounter literary and psychological secrets that resist decipherment, bodies that cannot be penetrated, writers depicted as intruders, parents that ask to be welcomed by their children.
This study also identifies, in Coetzee's narrative, an ethical proposal grounded on a logic of excess and unconditionality - a logic of 'not enough' - lying behind certain acts of hospitality, friendship, kindness, care, and guidance to the gate of death, acts that may transform prevailing unequal socio-historical conditions and hostile personal relationships, characterized by a logic of parasitism and intrusion. As the figure of the writer progressively gains explicit prominence in Coetzee's literary production, special attention will be paid to it, as it alternately appears as secretary and master, migrant and intruder, pervert and foe, citizen and neighbour. Overall, Acts of Visitation analyzes how Coetzee's works depict the (South) African land, the Karoo farm, the familial household or the writer's and literary character's house as simultaneously contending and redemptive sites in which urgent historical, ethical, and metafictional issues are spatially explored and dramatized.' (Publishers' website)

Works published before Coetzee's arrival in Australia including, Dusklands, In the Heart of the Country, Waiting for the Barbarians, Life &​ Times of Michael K, Age of Iron, Disgrace, Foe, Boyhood and The Master of Petersburg are also discussed in this critical work.

'In this article, I argue that J.M. Coetzee’s autobiographical trilogy can be read as a set of texts in which the author responds to the problem of cynical self-doubt, as it is described in Coetzee’s writings on confession from the mid-1980s. Against Derek Attridge’s critical view of the relation between Coetzee’s autobiographies and these early writings, I argue that Coetzee’s texts do not passively abide by the author’s early scepticism, but rather inspect the grounds of cynical self-doubt and show its position to be intellectually confused. I specifically demonstrate that Coetzee’s texts present cynical self-doubt as an intellectualisation of akratic failure (weakness of will). The texts not only analyse the crisis from which cynical self-doubt emerges, but also try to look beyond a sceptical perspective. With this in mind, this article will read Coetzee’s autobiographies as writings that “aspire to a condition of gossip”. In this aspiration, the autobiographies point to an ethic of assent they themselves cannot yet fully inhabit.' (Author's abstract)

'R. G. (Guy) Howarth (1906-74) was a poet, scholar, teacher and advocate for Australian literature. He was foundation editor of Southerly from 1939 to 1956. From 1955 to 1971 he was Arderne Professor of English Literature in the University of Cape Town, a position he accepted after he was passed over for the prestigious Challis Chair at Sydney University in a disappointment that stayed with him to his premature end.

'In Cape Town Howarth continued his research on English and Australian literature, and began to teach South African writing. In 'Sisters of the South' (1958) he made a case for comparing Australian, New Zealand and South African literature. He introduced a course called Imaginative Writing which J.M. Coetzee took as a student. In Youth (2002), Coetzee's protagonist remembers: 'Howarth, who is an Australian, seems to have taken a liking to him, he cannot see why.' Howarth introduced Coetzee and other UCT students to Australian writers. He encouraged Coetzee to approach Prof Joseph Jones at the University of Texas at Austin about graduate study. Today Coetzee's archive sits with both Howarth's and Jones's in the Harry Ransom Center at UTA.

'Jones saw in Howarth the avatar of 'a new-type literary historian' who would be polymathically able to approach 'all literature in English-as a reticulated if not yet wholly integrated world-phenomenon'. For Coetzee, Howarth is an example of a teacher who 'may not have much of inherent significance to convey' yet can still 'exert a shaping influence on his students'. This long legacy re-opens the question of what happened in Sydney in 1951 where a road blocked for Howarth became a road ahead elsewhere.' (Publication abstract)