"This course is entirely dedicated to the fiction of the South African writer J. M. Coetzee. We will study five important novels of Coetzee from his early influential novel that brought him to world attention, Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), to his latest “Australian novel” Diary of the Bad Year (2008). Born in Cape Town, South Africa, Coetzee is considered one of the most important living writers today. He has won the Nobel Prize in Literature (2003), the Booker Prize (twice), and the Jerusalem Prize, among other awards. Much of Coetzee’s writings emerge from the exigencies of South African apartheid. The course will examine the linguistic 2 orientation of Coetzee’s postmodern style, as well as explore some of the important themes in his novels such as justice, ethics, subalternity, and the critique of humanism."
