J.M. Coetzee

"David Attwell defends the literary and political integrity of the South African novelist J. M. Coetzee, arguing that he has absorbed the textual turn of postmodern culture while still addressing his nation's ethical crisis. As a form of "situational metafiction," Coetzee's novels are shown to reconstruct and critique some of the key discourses in the history of colonialism and apartheid from the eighteenth century to the present. While self-conscious about fiction-making, Coetzee's work takes seriously the condition of the society in which it is produced." "Attwell begins by describing the…