J. M. Coetzee And The Politics Of Style

J. M. Coetzee's early novels confronted readers with a brute reality stripped of human relation and a prose repeatedly described as spare, stark, intense and lyrical. In this book, Jarad Zimbler explores the emergence of a style forged in Coetzee's engagement with the complexities of South African culture and politics. Tracking the development of this style across Coetzee's first eight novels, from Dusklands to Disgrace, Zimbler compares Coetzee's writing with that of South African authors such as Gordimer, Brink and La Guma, whilst re-examining the nature of Coetzee's indebtedness to modernism and postmodernism. In each case, he follows the threads of Coetzee's own writings on stylistics and rhetoric in order to fix on those techniques of language and narrative used to activate a 'politics of style'. In so doing, Zimbler challenges long-held beliefs about Coetzee's oeuvre, and about the ways in which contemporary literatures of the world are to be read and understood. Review: 'Zimbler has taken a relatively traditional genre - the single-author monograph aimed at specialists - and armed it with something invigorating: a desire, first, to foreground the compositional concerns of a writer whose critics don't always attend to his handling of form; and, second, to reach beyond Coetzee aficionados by demonstrating assiduous treatments of diction, pace, and timbre that will appeal to anyone interested in contemporary writing.' David James, Public Books (publicbooks.org) 'In this accessible, elegant study, Zimbler achieves his stated goal, to 'analyze and explain the aesthetic decisions that produced and gave meaning to [Coetzee's] bare prose' ... Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates and above.' E. R. Baer, Choice 'This erudite, wide-ranging, intellectually ambitious work makes a significant contribution not only to Coetzee studies but also to postcolonialist studies and contemporary fiction studies more broadly ... The insistent but unforced attention to what Zimbler calls 'those subtle shifts in tense and tone, vocabulary and register' in order to make visible 'a politics of style' will inform other literary critics grappling with how not to reduce the aesthetic qualities that help constitute politically charged writings both within and beyond postcolonial studies.' Chair's Report, 2016 University English Book Prize