In her analysis of the South African novelist J. M. Coetzee's
literary and intellectual career, Jane Poyner illuminates the
author's abiding preoccupation with what Poyner calls the "paradox
of postcolonial authorship". Writers of conscience or
conscience-stricken writers of the kind Coetzee portrays, whilst
striving symbolically to bring the stories of the marginal and the
oppressed to light, always risk reimposing the very authority they
seek to challenge. From Dusklands to Diary of a Bad Year, Poyner
traces how Coetzee rehearses and revises his understanding of the
ethics of intellectualism in parallel with the emergence of the
"new South Africa". She contends that Coetzee's modernist
aesthetics facilitate a more exacting critique of the problems that
encumber postcolonial authorship, including the authority it
necessarily engenders. Poyner is attentive to the ways Coetzee's
writing addresses the writer's proper role with respect to the
changing ethical demands of contemporary political life.
Theoretically sophisticated and accessible, her book is a major
contribution to our understanding of the Nobel Laureate and to
postcolonial studies.
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