J.M. Coetzee and the Archive: Fiction, Theory, and Autobiography

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Description

Making extensive use of the rich archival material contained within the Coetzee collections in Texas and South Africa, from the earliest drafts and notebooks to the research notes and digital records that document his later career as both writer and academic, this volume investigates the historical, cultural and aesthetic contexts of Coetzee's oeuvre. Cutting-edge and interdisciplinary in approach, the book looks both at the prolific archival traces of Coetzee's early and middle work as well as examines his more recent work (which has yet to be archived), and a wide range of materials beyond the manuscripts, including family albums, school notebooks and correspondence. Navigating Coetzees interests in areas as diverse as literature, photography, autobiography, philosophy, animals and embodied life, this is also an exploration of the archive as both theory and practice. It raises questions about the tensions, contradictions and discoveries of archival research, and suggests that a literary engagement with the past is crucial to a recovery of culture in the present.

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J. M. Coetzee & the Archive is the first edited collection to focus explicitly on Coetzees archive. By turns informative, revelatory, thought-provoking, and inspiring, the essays and conversations in this volume broach new ways of engaging with Coetzees corpus, and contribute to current theoretical debates about the archival turn in literary-critical studies. * Carrol Clarkson, Professor of Modern English Literature, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands *

Author Bio

Kai Easton is Senior Lecturer in English at SOAS University of London, UK. She is co-editor (with Derek Attridge) of Zo Wicomb and the Translocal (2017), and co-curator (with David Attwell) of the travelling exhibition, Scenes from the South (2020-21), a collaboration with Amazwi South African Museum of Literature and the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin, to mark Coetzees eightieth birthday. Marc Farrant recently completed his doctorate at Goldsmiths, University of London, UK, on Samuel Beckett and J.M. Coetzee. He currently lectures in English at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands. He was awarded a doctoral research fellowship at the Harry Ransom Center in 2015. Hermann Wittenberg is Professor of English at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa. He has published several archival studies on Khoi narratives and the work of J.M. Coetzee and Alan Paton. Recent work includes the international exhibition (2017-2020) and photobook, J.M. Coetzee: Photographs from Boyhood (2020).