J.M. Coetzee and the Archive

Kai Easton is Senior Lecturer in English at SOAS University of London, UK. She is co-editor (with Derek Attridge) of Zoë Wicomb and the Translocal (2017), and co-curator (with David Attwell) of the travelling exhibition, Scenes from the South (2020-21), a collaboration with Amazwi South African Museum of Literature and the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin, to mark Coetzee’s eightieth birthday.Marc Farrant recently completed his doctorate at Goldsmiths, University of London, UK, on Samuel Beckett and J.M. Coetzee. He currently lectures in English at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands. He was awarded a doctoral research fellowship at the Harry Ransom Center in 2015.Hermann Wittenberg is Professor of English at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa. He has published several archival studies on Khoi narratives and the work of J.M. Coetzee and Alan Paton. Recent work includes the international exhibition (2017-2020) and photobook, J.M. Coetzee: Photographs from Boyhood (2020).

J. M. Coetzee & the Archive is the first edited collection to focus explicitly on Coetzee’s archive. By turns informative, revelatory, thought-provoking, and inspiring, the essays and “conversations” in this volume broach new ways of engaging with Coetzee’s corpus, and contribute to current theoretical debates about “the archival turn” in literary-critical studies.

• 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’