Approaches to Teaching Coetzee's 'Disgrace' and Other Works

The novels of the South African writer J. M. Coetzee won him global recognition and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2003. His work offers substantial pedagogical richness and challenges. Coetzee treats such themes as race, aging, gender, animal rights, power, violence, colonial history and accountability, the silent or silenced other, sympathy, and forgiveness in an allusive and detached prose that avoids obvious answers or easy ethical reassurance.

Part 1 of this volume, "Materials," identifies secondary materials, including multimedia and Internet resources, that will help instructors guide their students through the contextual and formal complexities of Coetzee's fiction. In part 2, "Approaches," essays discuss how to teach works that are sometimes suspicious of teachers and teaching. The essays aim to help instructors negotiate Coetzee's ironies and allegories in his treatment of human relationships in a changing South Africa and of the shifting connections between human beings and the biosphere.

Laura Wright is associate professor of postcolonial literature and chair of the English Department at Western Carolina University. She is author of Writing "Out of All the Camps": J. M. Coetzee's Narratives of Displacement and "Wilderness into Civilized Shapes": Reading the Postcolonial Environment. Jane Poyner is senior lecturer in postcolonial literature and theory in the Department of English at the University of Exeter. She is author of J. M. Coetzee and the Paradox of Postcolonial Authorship and editor of J. M. Coetzee and the Idea of the Public Intellectual. Elleke Boehmer is professor of world literature in English at the University of Oxford. She is author of Colonial and Postcolonial Literature; Empire, the National and the Postcolonial; Nelson Mandela; and Stories of Women. She has coedited J. M. Coetzee in Context and Theory; The Indian Postcolonial; and The Postcolonial Low Countries. She has had published four novels and a collection of short stories.