Publication date:
01 December 2015Length of book:
124 pagesPublisher
UPAISBN-13: 9780761866930
Relying on the author's personal recollections as well as on J.M. Coetzee's autobiographical and fictional works, this book deals with Coetzee's formation as a writer of international prominence, whose life and writing career began in South Africa. Drawing on Coetzee's "South African" writings from Dusklands through Disgrace, the book considers Coetzee's initial positioning in provincial South African political and literary culture as well as his drastic reframing of South African "letters" and his breakout into a global career culminating in the award of the Nobel Prize in 2003. The book considers Coetzee almost exclusively in relation to the South Africa from which he emigrated in 1999, but also emphasizes his momentous revision and undoing of the marginalized genre of "South African Literature" in the service of global authorship. Written in the conviction that Coetzee's "South African" works remain his most impassioned and momentous ones, this book seeks to come to terms with their conditions of possibility and distinctive achievement.
Part-memoir, part-biography, part-criticism, Jonathan Crewe’s account of the provenance of J.M. Coetzee’s fiction is erudite and poignant. In the Middle of Nowhere is the story of a friendship, but one rooted in a shared background and situation. As young literary intellectuals at odds with colonial ‘English,’ both found wider horizons in the American academy, but without being able to put the past firmly behind them. The intimacy of Crewe’s account of the Nobel laureate’s intellectual biography makes it essential reading in Coetzee studies.