Strong Opinions: J.M. Coetzee and the Authority of Contemporary Fiction

Acknowledgements Contributors Introduction J.M. Coetzee: the Janus Face of Authority Chris Danta Part One: Place 1. J.M. Coetzee's Australian Realism Elleke Boehmer 2. "[I]n Australia you start zero": the Escape from Place in J.M. Coetzee's Late Novels Melinda Harvey 3. J.M. Coetzee and Patrick White: Explorers, Settlers, Guests Maria L pez Part Two: Form 4. Coetzee's Opinons Paul Patton 5. Diary of a Bad Year: Parrhesia, Opinion, and Novelistic Form Julian Murphet 6. Realism and Intertextuality in Coetzee's Foe Anthony Uhlmann Part Three: Limits 7. The Trope of Following in J. M. Coetzee's Slow Man Mike Marais 8. Literary Migration: Shifting Borders in Coetzee's Australian Novels Sue Kossew 9. The Melancholy Ape: Coetzee's Fables of Animal Finitude Chris Danta 10. Silence as Heterotopia in Coetzee's Fiction Bill Ashcroft Bibliography Index

Chris Danta is Senior Lecturer in English in the School of English, Media and Performing Arts at the University of New South Wales. He has published essays in New Literary History, Textual Practice, Modernism/Modernity, Sub-Stance and Literature and Theology. Sue Kossew is Professor of English at Monash University, Australia. Her publications include Pen and Power: A Post-colonial Reading of J. M. Coetzee and Andr Brink (1996), Critical Essays on J. M. Coetzee (1998), Re-Imagining Africa: New Critical Perspectives (Nova Science, 2001, co-edited with Dianne Schwerdt) and Writing Woman, Writing Place: Australian and South African Fiction (2004). Julian Murphet is Professor of Modern Film and Literature at the University of New South Wales, Australia. He is the author of Multimedia Modernism (2009), Literature and Race in Los Angeles (2001), co-author of Narrative and Media (Cambridge University Press, 2005), and co-editor of Literature and Visual Technologies (2003).

"A clearly focussed and helpful contribution to the demanding and as yet barely embarked-upon task of coming to terms with Coetzee's most recent writings." -- Stephen Mulhall, Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy, New College, University of Oxford, UK, and author of The Wounded Animal: J.M.Coetzee and the Difficulty of Reality in Literature and Philosophy (Princeton University Press) "The essays in Strong Opinions, written by some of the top scholars in the field of Coetzee studies, work in productive ways to examine how Coetzee's writing, particularly his post-apartheid and Australia-era works, perform a position that not only questions the role of literature as authority but also deconstruct the very idea that literary authority is possible. These essays call to attention Coetzee's explicitly self-conscious act of story telling as his works navigate and negotiate specific locales, both literal and figurative. And this collection, like the works that it examines, astutely pushes the limits of what literature and literary analysis can do and asks that we, as readers, explore a tenuous duality in Coetzee's fiction: the public duty of the writer to his audience and the private - and perhaps transcendent - duty of the artist to his conscience." -- Laura Wright, Associate Professor of English, Western Carolina University, USA, and author of Writing "Out of All the Camps": J.M. Coetzee's Narratives of Displacement (Routledge)