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 Periodical article |
 Leiden University catalogue |
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| Title: | Text and Hinterland: J.M. Coetzee and the South African Novel |
| Author: | Easton, T. Kai Norris |
| Year: | 1995 |
| Periodical: | Journal of Southern African Studies |
| Volume: | 21 |
| Issue: | 4 |
| Period: | December |
| Pages: | 585-599 |
| Language: | English |
| Geographic term: | South Africa |
| Subjects: | literature Literature, Mass Media and the Press |
| About person: | John Maxwell Coetzee (1940-) |
| External link: | https://www.jstor.org/stable/2637210 |
| Abstract: | Although most of J.M. Coetzee's novels and criticism range well beyond a South African terrain, they also track this course - at times - deliberately. This article explores the ambivalent space of Coetzee's fiction with particular reference to 'Life & times of Michael K' (1983) and 'Age of iron' (1990). Coetzee's novels retreat and roam; like Michael K, they root themselves 'nowhere'. But the South African base is there - in the Cape, from which his stories emigrate. As such, his oeuvre might be seen as a series of 'travelling texts' which reinscribes, by dislocation, a South African topography. Is there a way to discuss Coetzee's narratives as 'South African' without reducing his novels to a reading of the 'nation'? Can his novels be read as 'national' text precisely for their fragmented South Africanness - a 'nationality' which presupposes diversity and a mingling of cultures and forms? The article shows that if, as a writer, Coetzee has placed himself outside a narrowly defined 'national' field, it could also be argued that the progressions and digressions in his oeuvre are essential to the multivocality of a 'new' South Africa. His novels offer a new kind of mapmaking which opens up the space of South African fiction. Notes, ref., sum. |
