Charting J. M. Coetzee's Middle Voice

Abstract

n a sketch metaphorically outlining the topology of recent South African writing, the work of J. M. Coetzee might appropriately be placed somewhere in the middle of a topographical map-in the heart of the country, as it were. Coetzee's writing situates itself between: on the one hand, the less novelistic and often nonfictional literary tradition long associated with black writing-poetry, autobiography, journalism, theater, and protest forms of short fiction-and, on the other hand, the narrative legacy of liberal realism in white writing inherited from Olive Schreiner and passed down through Alan Paton, Phyllis Altman, Harry Bloom, Dan Jacobson, early Nadine Gordimer, and a number of more recent novelists working in English or in Afrikaans.