Narratives of Disability and Illness in the Fiction of J. M. Coetzee

Paweł Wojtas is an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Artes Liberales, University of Warsaw. He completed his MLitt degree in English Studies at the University of Stirling (2008) and a PhD in Arts and Humanities at the University of Warsaw (2012). He acted as a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the University of York (2018) and The Kosciuszko Foundation Research Fellow at the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin (2022). His main research area involves literary representations of disability in contemporary English and related literary fiction.

In this first, full-length study of disability and illness in J. M. Coetzee’s fiction, Paweł Wojtas explores the subject not just as theme, but as part of the textual surface and creative practice of the Nobel laureate. Informed by judicious use of Coetzee’s notebooks and manuscripts, and by wide reading in cultural theory and Coetzee criticism, Wojtas offers generous, illuminating and conceptually inventive readings of the entire oeuvre.

• AcknowledgementsList of AbbreviationsIntroduction: Towards the Embodied Fiction of J. M. CoetzeeChapter 1. Disabled Textuality: Dusklands and In the Heart of the CountryChapter 2. Scopic Regimes, Haptic Commitments: Countering Ocularnormativism in Waiting for the BarbariansChapter 3. Eco-Ability and Narrative Violence in Life & Times of Michael K Chapter 4. Mute Letters: Against Phonocentrism in FoeChapter 5. Impossible Modalities, Ailing Selves: Illness, Metaphor and Selfhood in Age of IronChapter 6. Disability Ethics and Gothic Form in The Master of PetersburgChapter 7. Dismodernism and Forms of Dependency in Slow ManChapter 8. What is the World Coming to? Senility, Illness and Irony in the Costello Fictions and Diary of a Bad Year Chapter 9. Negative Capabilities: Illness Narrative as Bibliotherapy in the Jesus NovelsEpilogue: Positive IncapabilitiesWorks CitedIndex