Approaches to Teaching Coetzee’s Disgrace and Other Works
- Editors: Laura Wright, Jane Poyner, Elleke Boehmer
- Pages: xii & 248 pp.
- Published: 2014
- ISBN: 9781603291385 (Cloth)
- ISBN: 9781603291392 (Paperback)
“The sheer range of critical and pedagogical approaches canvased is little short of astonishing, and the ingenuity and effort that these teachers of Coetzee put into preparing their courses should be a source of real inspiration to their readers.”
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.
David Attwell
Rita Barnard
Michael Bell
Louise Bethlehem
Carrol Clarkson
Stephen Clingman
Emily S. Davis
Gerald Gaylard
Johan Geertsema
Martina Ghosh-Schellhorn
Erik Grayson
Patrick Hayes
Kay Heath
Keith Leslie Johnson
Patricia Merivale
Shannon Payne
Robert Spencer
Andrew van der Vlies
Pieter Vermeulen
Wendy Woodward
Acknowledgments (ix)
PART ONE: MATERIALS
Contexts and Criticism (4)
Disgrace (4)
Other Works (6)
Form (9)
Intertextuality (10)
Further Resources (10)
Historical Background to South Africa (10)
Biographical Resources (12)
Supplemental Student Reading (12)
Multimedia, Internet, and Other Resources (15)
PART TWO: APPROACHES
Introduction: Teaching with/out Authority (19)
On Difficulty
Prologue: Why Not to Teach Coetzee (31)
What Does It Mean to Teach The Lives of Animals or Disgrace? (43)
Intellectual Contexts
Horizons Not Only of Expectation: Lessons from In the Heart of the Country (49)
Teaching Coetzee’s Subject: Waiting for the Barbarians and Disgrace (59)
Coetzee’s Other Other: An Existential Approach to Teaching Disgrace (67)
Reading Coetzee’s Worldliness (73)
Teaching the Critique of Romanticism and Empire in Disgrace (80)
Historical and Cultural Contexts
Teaching Coetzee, Then and Now (87)
“[From] Whom This Writing Then?” Politics, Aesthetics, and the Personal in Coetzee’s Age of Iron (96)
Refusing Adamastor: Lucy Lurie and “White Writing” in Disgrace (105)
Countering Context: Teaching Disgrace in the New South Africa (112)
Teaching Coetzee and Australia (117)
Teaching Coetzee’s American Contexts; or, How I Teach America—and Africa—in Cullowhee, North Carolina (123)
Ethics and Representation
Teaching Disgrace at the University of Cape Town (131)
Pedagogies of Discomfort: Teaching Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals (139)
Open to Interpretation: Politics and Allegory in Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians (146)
Who’s Appropriating Whose Voice in Coetzee’s Life and Times of Michael K? (152)
Biopolitical Coetzee; or, “The Will to Be Against” (160)
Classroom Contexts
Reconciling Whiteness: Disgrace as Postcolonial Text at a Historically Black University (167)
Teaching Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals in the First-Year Composition Classroom (174)
Teaching Coetzee’s Foe in an Undergraduate Theory Classroom (180)
Coetzee and Close Reading (187)
Notes on Contributors (195)
Survey Respondents (199)
Works Cited (201)
Index (223)