Foes

This chapter examines the work of South African novelist J. M. Coetzee, drawing throughout from his archive at the Harry Ransom Center (housed at the University of Texas at Austin). The chapter begins by tracing Coetzee’s long-standing scepticism about whether literary criticism can access the significant knowledge of literature. The author voices his scepticism through different critical idioms. The chapter then continues to examine three of Coetzee’s books in particular—Dusklands, Foe, and Elizabeth Costello. Whereas Coetzee in his earliest fiction sought to integrate critical debates as he understood them, his later work seeks to disorient schematic literary critical discourse. The chapter demonstrates how in these later works Coetzee’s writing intervenes in specific ways into the literary culture in which he was enmeshed, and how these fictions think through the demands made on writers to contribute to political struggles and forms of flourishing. The chapter concludes with an account of how the self-reflexivity of Coetzee’s literary archive itself may be read, asking whether it may be considered another incursion into the author’s reception and the procedures of contemporary criticism more generally.