Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2025 -

Narratives Of Disability And Illness In The Fiction Of J. M. Coetzee
 ISBN: 9781399522571Price: 130.00  
Volume: Dewey: 823.914Grade Min: Publication Date: 2024-03-01 
LCC: LCN: PR9369.3.C58Z94 2024Grade Max: Version:  
Contributor: Wojtas, PaweSeries: Publisher: Edinburgh University PressExtent: 320 
Contributor: Reviewer: Elizabeth R. BaerAffiliation: Gustavus Adolphus CollegeIssue Date: August 2025 
Contributor:     

Nobel and Booker Prize-winner J. M Coetzee writes fiction that is most often associated with a critique of the apartheid state of South Africa through direct or metaphorical representation. In his superlative analysis of Coetzee's oeuvre, Wojtas (Univ. of Warsaw, Poland) takes interpretation in a relatively unexplored direction: disability studies. Wojtas cites earlier studies using this approach and then goes on to define his own: "I attempt to show in this book ... [that] the disabled textuality of Coetzee's fiction consists in the ways in which his narratives reproduce--through the formal strategies of fragmentation, temporal disruption, deferral of closure, ambiguity, and structural incompleteness--mechanisms that are commonly associated with the normative notions of disability experience" (p. 2). Wojtas also discusses Coetzee characters who have psychiatric disorders, impairments of various kinds, disfigurements, and terminal illness. Additionally, Wojtas, who had access to the Coetzee archive at the University of Texas, demonstrates the ways in which this focus on disability has evolved over Coetzee's career and functions as an autobiographical trope. Wojtas has deeply and admirably researched this study, as both his grasp of disability theory and his bibliography reveal.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty.