Narratives of Disability and Illness in the Fiction of J. M. Coetzee

by Pawel Wojtas

Overview

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, Paweł 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781399522571
Publisher:	Edinburgh University Press
Publication date:	03/01/2024
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x (d)

About the Author

Paweł 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.

Table of Contents

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

Editorial Reviews

In this first, full-length study of disability and illness in J. M. Coetzee’s fiction, Paweł 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 Coetzee’s 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

Wojtas has deeply and admirably researched this study, as both his grasp of disability theory and his bibliography reveal.

Summing Up: Highly recommended.

CHOICE - E. R. Baer