Una’s Lectures

J.M. Coetzee, Una’s Lecturer 1998-1999

“The Novel in Africa” || November 11, 1998

Occasional Paper || Currently an honorary visiting fellow at the University of Adelaide, J.M. Coetzee completed a Ph.D. in literature at the University of Texas, Austin, in 1969. He wrote his dissertation on Samuel Beckett and cites Beckett’s middle period as a profound influence on his own work. He began writing his first novel, Dusklands, while teaching at the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1970. The novel reflects both his interest in the colonization of southern Africa and his response to American involvement in the Vietnam War. Though he was reluctant to return to South Africa, when his application for a green card was refused, Coetzee accepted a position in literature at the University of Cape Town, where he taught until 2002.

In The Life and Times of Michael K, which won the prestigious Booker Prize in 1983, Coetzee offers as a comic hero the young harelipped Michael K., a fugitive from civil war, who travels with his mother from Cape Town back to the farm where she may have spent her childhood. A simple-minded gardener, Michael K. endures time in a labor camp, starvation, and the war-time destruction of his farm, before returning to Cape Town. Even as the novel offers us a vision of apocalyptic destruction, betrayal, and loss, it also offers us the tentative consolation of Michael K’s resilience and the naively optimistic affirmation with which he ends the novel: “one can live.”

Coetzee’s writing thus participates in passionate debates about race and political power, even as it also engages in conversation with the great European novelists. In Foe, Coetzee responds to Robinson Crusoe; in The Master of Petersburg, Dostoevsky is the protagonist. His work has been translated into more than 20 languages.

Coetzee has held visiting professorships at numerous American institutions including Harvard, the University of Texas at Austin, Johns Hopkins, and the University of Chicago. Among his many honors, he holds honorary degrees from the University of Natal, Skidmore College, and the State University of New York.

Coetzee was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2003.

Other Events with Coetzee

Public Reading || November 12, 1998