J. M. Coetzee and the Politics of Style

J. M. Coetzee's early work employs bare, stark prose in order to depict a brute reality stripped of human relation. This book argues for the centrality of linguistic understanding in the study of literary works by exploring the subterranean operations of syntax, lexis, prosody and semantics in Coetzee's early fiction. Jarad Zimbler follows threads in Coetzee's first eight novels - from Duskland to Disgrace - as well as his writings on language and rhetoric to explore how literary style affects meaning more broadly. To this end, Zimbler gives an account of Coetzee's significant literary contexts, comparing his aesthetic practices with those of his predecessors and peers, including South African authors such as Gordimer and Brink as well as more well-known modernist writers. In this way, Zimbler suggests that Coetzee's debt to metropolitan modernism and postmodernism has been misrecognized, offering scholars and students of contemporary English literature a new perspective on Coetzee's works.