Postmodern
J. M. Coetzee
b. 1940
South African and Australian writer and scholar (born 1940)
- South Africa · Australia
- African
- Postmodernism
- Postcolonial Literature
- ◆ Nobel 2003
About
John Maxwell Coetzee AC FRSL OMG is a South African and Australian novelist, essayist, linguist, and translator. The recipient of the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature, Coetzee is one of the most critically acclaimed and decorated authors in the English language. He has won the Booker Prize (twice), the CNA Literary Award (thrice), the Jerusalem Prize, the Prix Femina étranger, and The Irish Times International Fiction Prize, and holds a number of other awards and honorary doctorates.
Source: Wikipedia (CC BY-SA). Portrait by Mariusz Kubik, http://www.mariuszkubik.pl (CC BY 2.5) via Wikimedia Commons.
Life on the Timeline
Major Works
Exam Dossier
Most-asked topics
- Waiting for the Barbarians and allegory of empire
- Life & Times of Michael K and the Booker Prize
- Disgrace and post-apartheid South Africa
- Postmodern and postcolonial narrative technique in Coetzee
- Coetzee's Nobel Prize in Literature (2003)
- Foe as a rewriting of Robinson Crusoe
- Autobiographical fiction: Boyhood and Youth
- Silence, animality and the ethics of the Other in Coetzee's fiction
Previous-year themes
- Coetzee as a postcolonial/postmodern South African novelist
- Booker Prize double-winners in English fiction (Coetzee named alongside others)
- Allegory and the unnamed Empire in Waiting for the Barbarians
- Intertextuality and rewriting the canon (Foe and Robinson Crusoe)
- Apartheid and post-apartheid themes in South African fiction
- Nobel laureates in English literature and their major works
- Narrative voice and metafiction in postmodern fiction
Common confusions
- Confusing Life & Times of Michael K (1983 Booker winner) with Waiting for the Barbarians (1980, no Booker)
- Confusing Coetzee's two Booker Prize novels: Life & Times of Michael K (1983) and Disgrace (1999)
- Confusing Foe (rewrites Robinson Crusoe) with The Master of Petersburg (imagines Dostoevsky)
- Mixing up Coetzee's autobiographical trilogy volumes: Boyhood, Youth, and Summertime
- Assuming Coetzee is purely a South African writer, overlooking his later Australian citizenship and residence
- Confusing Coetzee with fellow South African Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer (Nobel 1991) on dates and works
Memory tricks
'K' for Kafkaesque and 'K' for Michael K — both suggest an anonymous, minimal, endangered self
Booker twice: 'M' and 'D' — Michael K (1983) and Disgrace (1999)
Nobel in 2003 — same year as Elizabeth Costello was published
Foe = Fo(e) rewrites Defoe's Crusoe — the missing 'De' signals the rewriting/erasure
Boyhood, Youth, Summertime — B-Y-S in chronological order of Coetzee's life stages
Barbarians wait at the frontier of an unnamed Empire — 'unnamed' = allegory, not history
