The Case of Coetzee: South African Literary Criticism, 1990 to Today

Abstract

Summary The 1970s and 80s witnessed a vigorous, often polemical debate in the South African literary field between those dubbed “instrumental” (or political) critics and those of “art” persuasion. The end of apartheid promised a new phase of discussion. What has happened, however, is not so much a turn to artistic issues, but a turn to continental philosophers (Derrida, Foucault, Levinas) as theorists of an ethical respect for and responsibility to “otherness”. At the centre of such critical attention has been the novelist, J.M. Coetzee. The “case of Coetzee” provokes consideration of what, by the end of the 1990s, was in danger of becoming a new orthodoxy, in which the abstract language of theory is imported onto the text, often erasing the very character that grants the literary work its experiential distinctiveness. The article asks: is it not time to go beyond Coetzee's Disgrace (1999), to seek a new critical project for the new millennium? Perhaps Coetzee himself points a way forward.

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