A comprehensive study of the representations of disability and illness in the fiction of J. M. Coetzee
This study offers a detailed analysis of the fiction of J. M. Coetzee, including the novels of the South African and Australian periods, to demonstrate the development of Coetzee’s engagement with the complexities of non-normative embodiment. In this illuminating monograph, Pawel Wojtas demonstrates the extent to which Coetzee’s multifaceted depictions of disability offer a sustained critique of the ableist implications of political violence and neoliberal inclusionism alike. Exploring a wide range of notions, such as ocularnormativism, mute speech, eco-disability, disability Gothic, dismodernism, autogerontography, and bibliotherapy, Wojtas shows how Coetzee’s ‘disabled textuality’ provokes a sustained meditation on various forms of cultural denigration of disability experience.
Arvustused
In this first, full-length study of disability and illness in J. M. Coetzees fiction, Pawe Wojtas explores the subject not just as theme, but as part of the textual surface and creative practice of the Nobel laureate. Informed by judicious use of Coetzees notebooks and manuscripts, and by wide reading in cultural theory and Coetzee criticism, Wojtas offers generous, illuminating and conceptually inventive readings of the entire oeuvre. -- David Attwell, University of York Wojtas has deeply and admirably researched this study, as both his grasp of disability theory and his bibliography reveal.
Summing Up: Highly recommended. -- E. R. Baer, Gustavus Adolphus College * CHOICE *
Muu info
Winner of Choice Outstanding Academic Title 2025 (UK).
Acknowledgements
List of Abbreviations
Introduction: Towards the Embodied Fiction of J. M. Coetzee
Chapter
1. Disabled Textuality: Dusklands and In the Heart of the Country
Chapter
2. Scopic Regimes, Haptic Commitments: Countering Ocularnormativism
in Waiting for the Barbarians
Chapter
3. Eco-Ability and Narrative Violence in Life & Times of Michael K
Chapter
4. Mute Letters: Against Phonocentrism in Foe
Chapter
5. Impossible Modalities, Ailing Selves: Illness, Metaphor and
Selfhood in Age of Iron
Chapter
6. Disability Ethics and Gothic Form in The Master of Petersburg
Chapter
7. Dismodernism and Forms of Dependency in Slow Man
Chapter
8. What is the World Coming to? Senility, Illness and Irony in the
Costello Fictions and Diary of a Bad Year
Chapter
9. Negative Capabilities: Illness Narrative as Bibliotherapy in the
Jesus Novels
Epilogue: Positive Incapabilities
Works Cited
Index
Pawe Wojtas is an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Artes Liberales, University of Warsaw. He completed his MLitt degree in English Studies at the University of Stirling (2008) and a PhD in Arts and Humanities at the University of Warsaw (2012). He acted as a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the University of York (2018) and The Kosciuszko Foundation Research Fellow at the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin (2022). His main research area involves literary representations of disability in contemporary English and related literary fiction.
