J.M. Coetzee and the Archive

Making extensive use of the rich archival material contained within the Coetzee collections in Texas and South Africa, from the earliest drafts and notebooks to the research notes and digital records that document his later career as both writer and academic, this volume investigates the historical, cultural and aesthetic contexts of Coetzee's oeuvre. Cutting-edge and interdisciplinary in approach, the book looks both at the prolific archival traces of Coetzee's early and middle work as well as examines his more recent work (which has yet to be archived), and a wide range of materials beyond the manuscripts, including family albums, school notebooks and correspondence. Navigating Coetzee's interests in areas as diverse as literature, photography, autobiography, philosophy, animals and embodied life, this is also an exploration of the archive as both theory and practice. It raises questions about the tensions, contradictions and discoveries of archival research, and suggests that a literary engagement with the past is crucial to a recovery of culture in the present.

Introduction: Kai Easton , Marc Farrant & Hermann Wittenberg I. Authorship and Autre-biography 1. Kai Easton (SOAS University of London, UK) - 'Landmarks: Reading Coetzee's Maternal Lines' 2. Shaun Irlam (University of Buffalo, SUNY, USA) - 'Summertime Sadness: Coetzee, coordinates & negation of the archive' 3. Valeria Mosca (Independent Scholar) - 'On the Loss of Fathers and Letters: reading Summertime and The Childhood of Jesus alongside Jacques Derrida's Archive Fever' II. History, Politics & the Archive 4. Andrew van der Vlies (Queen Mary University of London, UK) - 'Writing, Politics, Position: Coetzee and Gordimer in and out of the archive' 5. Hermann Wittenberg (University of the Western Cape, South Africa)- 'Out of the Dark Chamber: violence, desire and the late apartheid state in the textual history of Waiting for the Barbarians' III: Archival Methods: Practice, Data, Process 6. Peter Johnston (Cambridge Assessment, UK) - 'Humming with fear of sincerity and fabulator': first observations from the Coetzee corpus and the Coetzee bot 7. Michael Green (Northumbria University, UK) - 'On Reflection: Coetzee, the archive, and practice research' IV. On Literary Objects: Form and Style in the Archive 8. David Isaacs (Independent Scholar) - 'Archival Realism: Elizabeth Costello, Disgrace and the realm of revision' 9. Paul Stewart (University of Nicosia, Cyrpus) - 'In Pursuit of Style: Coetzee reading Beckett in the archive' V. Philosophy and the Archive: Between Life and Truth 10. Marc Farrant (University of Amsterdam, Netherlands) - 'The Aura of Truth': Coetzee's archive, realism, and the question of literary authority' 11. Richard A. Barney (University of Albany, SUNY, USA) - 'Coetzee, biopolitics, and the archive of impersonality' 12. Russell Samolsky (UC Santa Barbara, USA) - 'Shades of the Archive: J. M. Coetzee, the paradox of poetic sovereignty, and the lives of literary beings' VI. Conversations with Coetzee 13. Jennifer Rutherford (University of Adelaide, Australia) - 'Curating Coetzee: from Austin to Adelaide' 14. Richard Mosse (Artist, Ireland) - 'Incoming/Waiting for the Barbarians' 15. Kai Easton (SOAS, UK) - '34** South'