J.M. Coetzee: Critical Perspectives
Edited by Kailash C. Baral
 
 
The essays included in this volume offer a range of critical perspectives on J.M. Coetzee’s fictional works. As a novelist J.M. Coetzee is difficult to classify and perhaps the only contemporary author who has generated diverse critical responses on his works. As an author Coetzee brings to his work a unique combination of intellectual power, stylistic poise, historical vision, and ethical penetration. Theoretically informed and a master of enigmatic writing Coetzee in his works has problemtised issues of “writing”, “authority”, “power”, “race”, “patriarchy”, “gender”, “marginality”, “voice” among others including “authorial identity” in unimaginable ways. Using a disembodied language with the sharpness and precision of a surgeon’s knife and skill, the Nobel laureate has thematised life and reality not only in/of South Africa as such but with a complex, often paradoxical perspective in his own quest for a new humanism. The study looks critically at Coetzee’s fictional oeuvre in order to help readers in understanding his complex fictional world.

 

Kailash C. Baral is Professor of English and Director of the Shillong Campus of the English and Foreign Languages University. He has authored Sigmund Freud: A Study of his Theory of Art and Literature (1994) and edited Humanities and Pedagogy: Teaching of Humanities Today (2002), Interpretation of Texts: Text, Meaning and Interpretation (2002) and Earth Songs: Stories from Northeast India (2005). He has co-edited Theory and Praxis: Curriculum, Culture and English Studies (2003), Reflections on Literature, Criticism and Theory (2004), and U.R.Anantha Murthy’s Samskara: A Critical Reader (2005). His articles on critical theory, cultural studies and postcolonial literatures are published in India and abroad and also included in many anthologies.
 
Contributors : Parag M. Sarma, Aroma Kharshiing, Seth B. Pardick, Wang Jinghui, Mike Marais, Lois Wolfe, Arindam Chatterjee, Bijaya K. Danta, Suresh Raval, Erik Grayson, Tim McIntyre, Madan M. Sarma, Farheena Danta, Greg Pritchard, Denise Almeida Silva, Fiona Probyn-Rapsey.
 
ISBN 81-85753-91-1           2008           280 pp           Rs.600 (hb)