This chapter concerns Coetzee’s encounter with philosophers and philosophy. After a brief description of Coetzee’s formation and institutional affiliations, it turns its focus to the ways in which Coetzee has probed both the capacity of literary works to confront philosophical questions and the innate capacities and limitations of philosophy’s own embedded disciplinary procedures and approved forms of discourse. It argues that Coetzee has done this by developing provocations: elaborating propositions – about the nature of human language, consciousness, and being; about the nature of truth, knowledge, and existence – that entice and frustrate philosophical readers, asking that they at least consider what their discipline takes for granted or leaves out of account in its framing of these issues.

J. M. Coetzee is the author of fourteen novels, three autobiographical fictions, and several volumes of translations, critical essays, correspondence, and short stories. Born in 1940 in Cape Town, South Africa, and resident there throughout his childhood and for much of his adult life, he has lived since 2002 in Adelaide, Australia.

This chapter is prompted by Coetzee’s longstanding interest in stories and storytelling, an interest that is registered across his critical essays and reviews, and thematized in several of his works. Focusing on In the Heart of the Country, The Master of Petersburg, and The Childhood of Jesus, as well as the computer poem ‘Hero and Bad Mother in Epic’, the chapter charts the relationship between the kinds of story that Coetzee has told – generally limited in the scope of their plots and the number of their principal characters – and the forms of narration he has adopted, which vary from the first-person character narration of certain of his early and middle fictions, to the tightly focalized external narration of his later works, to the dialogue-heavy and somewhat affectless narration of the Jesus novels. In each case, it is suggested that the particular form of narration is related to the particular truth with which the work in question seeks to confront its readers.

This chapter outlines J. M. Coetzee’s major works of criticism and academic scholarship, including a substantial number of literary reviews, that attest to his wide-ranging and astute reading and critical activity. It examines a number of threads in Coetzee’s critical writings, including his ground-breaking scholarly study of South African literary culture, White Writing (1988), the most important volume of his interviews and essays, Doubling the Point (1992), and those on censorship in Giving Offense (1996). It considers the three collections of his literary reviews and essays in the volumes Stranger Shores: Essays 1986-1999 (2001), Inner Workings: Literary Essays 2000-2005 (2007) and, most recently, Late Essays: 2006-2017 (2017). In doing so, it argues that it is not surprising that critics, scholars and students of Coetzee’s fictions so often turn to his own critical works, scholarly essays and reviews for clues and insights into his literary oeuvre as well as reading them in their own right, as examples of complex ‘literary-critical-philosophical thinking’. At the same time, while the style of these essays and reviews is in marked contrast to the experimental mode of his fictions, they provide a fascinating perspective on his engagement with the work of other writers.

J. M. Coetzee is often thought a solitary, reclusive figure, but he has long collaborated with other writers and artists. Correspondence and epistolary conventions also play an important role in Coetzee’s fictional work. This chapter argues that we must look beyond the apparent contradiction between Coetzee the private man and Coetzee the collaborator, to understand conflict as central to his pursuit of dialogue. The chapter explores the ways in which writing, reflection, and critique are at the heart of Coetzee’s collaborative work and suggests that these elements are not at odds with his rejection of the demand for immediate, unplanned speech. The chapter provides detailed readings of Coetzee’s works of correspondence, The Good Story and Here and Now, as well as examining his use of epistolary conventions and techniques in his fiction, particularly in Summertime and Age of Iron. The chapter concludes that Coetzee’s commitment to collaboration and correspondence is simultaneously a resistance to producing a single repeatable life-story or superficial exchange, and that just as mediation is necessary to move beyond the stock phrases of epistolary exchange, so errors and disagreements are essential in creating meaningful dialogue.

Housed in the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, the assiduously organized (and carefully curated) Coetzee Papers include manuscript drafts of Coetzee’s novels (formerly available at the Houghton Library, Harvard College), as well as notebooks, correspondence, teaching materials, and photographs. Only recently opened, this archive has prompted a new wave of critical studies, only some of which have been sufficiently alert to, or indeed sceptical of, the procedures and decisions involved in its establishment and organization. Reflecting on this, this chapter considers the provenance and particular character of these papers in light of Coetzee’s career-long quarrying of autobiographical materials, his project of self-archiving, his explorations of archival themes and use of archival energies in his fictions, and his particular interest in the nature of secrets and lies, of concealment, distortion, and revelation. It argues that it is vital that critics think carefully about their own purposes in reading the archives; about the writer’s purposes in producing them; and about the kinds of truth at stake in the works, the archives, and the literary criticism they occasion.

Coetzee’s interest in, and ability to exploit, the conventions and expectations of genre is evident throughout his career; this chapter focuses on three examples in which the relation between fiction and non-fiction is put in question, Elizabeth Costello, Diary of a Bad Year, and Summertime. In the case of the first of these works, the chapter examines Coetzee’s conversion of lectures into a fiction, and asks how we are to take the opinions expressed by the eponymous individual. In the case of Diary of a Bad Year, it discusses Coetzee’s framing of diary entries within a fictional narrative, and considers the degree of authorial endorsement of the resulting ‘opinions’ and the effect of the story unfolding at the foot of the page. In Summertime, the generic challenge of a memoir supposedly written after the author’s death is explored, and attention is paid to the work’s status as autobiography and as comic self-interrogation.

This chapter introduces the critical issues that permeate the discussion of the location and horizon of Coetzee’s literary practice. It starts by noting a polarization among critics between those who characterize his literary project as being a highly localized one that speaks to the condition of South Africa and those who regard his work as being concerned with universal problems and as belonging to ‘world literature’. It delves into this problem by considering the way Coetzee himself narrates the vicissitudes of a writer navigating national and global literary fields in Elizabeth Costello. Looking next at his corpus as a whole, the chapter argues that an appreciation of Coetzee’s peculiar world-making fictional strategies helps us to discern that world (or worlds) to which his fictions seek to orient us. It concludes by considering Coetzee’s recent interest in the ‘literatures of the south’, speculating that his corpus has been concerned to explore through its world-making what it means to live beneath southern horizons.

This chapter explicates the ways in which setting matters in Coetzee’s writing. The settings assembled in its mises en scène are vital to narrative world-making; at the same time, they perform an indexical function that invests these narratives with ‘worldly weight’, thus establishing a relation to the real that is simultaneously fictitious and true. Tracking a movement from the insular and segregated state of apartheid South Africa, through the provincial-metropolitan axis and along the southern latitudes in Foe, Boyhood, Youth, and Slow Man, the chapter shows how these settings indicate a sustained and deepening sense of situatedness that is both informed by and larger than the national contexts of South Africa and Australia. Chafing against the national frame, the settings of these works elaborate the category of the provincial and then redirect it to that of ‘the South’. They function as neither tromp l’oeil nor exotic local colour, neither blank screen nor empty frame, but instead convey the substance of the ‘real South’ while locating it as alternative centre of gravity that generates its own deictic markers.

This chapter explores the genesis and development of the two novels that brought J. M. Coetzee significant international notice, Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) and Life & Times of Michael K (1983). It makes use of Coetzee’s papers which are housed at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin, in particular Coetzee’s manuscripts and notebooks, in giving an account of his creative processes in the formative stages of his career. The chapter shows that ‘composition and craft’ in Coetzee involved a creative tension between self-discipline, organization, and rigour, and openness to the uncertainties of invention.

Rabindranāth Tagore's contribution to the visual arts in India is twofold: his own work as a painter and his role in bringing about a new turn in Indian art. These two achievements cannot be separated. His role as a critical interlocutor must be considered alongside his success in becoming an acknowledged painter after having failed initially. Given his multifaceted creative personality, his paintings must also be related to the rest of his works.

Tagore began to paint only in 1928, at the age of sixty-seven. He held his first exhibition in Paris two years later and left an oeuvre of more than 2,300 paintings. However, his interest in painting has a longer history. In his reminiscences, he mentions drawing as an item in the all-round education he received at home as a boy. As with literature and music, he was first drawn to painting by the activities of his elders. His brother Jyotirindranāth, who had a pervasive influence on him, and his cousin Gunendranāth, whose sons Abanindranāth and Gaganendranāth became pioneers of modern art in India, were amateur painters of talent. Rabindranath recollects how, even as he was first gaining recognition as a writer, he would spend afternoons with a drawing book, ‘toying with the desire to make pictures’. He significantly continues: ‘The most important part was that which remained in the mind, and not a line of which got drawn on paper.’ At thirty-nine, he writes to Jagadishchandra Basu (Bose) that his artistic impulse remained as ineffectual as before. Soon after, he gave up the effort until, almost surprising himself, he resumed it successfully in late life.

Abandoning his initial efforts to become a painter did not end his interest in art. His continuing engagement as a critical viewer and interlocutor helped not only to develop a new trajectory of Indian art but also to discover new expressive possibilities in himself. His early response to art was, however, no different from that of other members of his class and time. His first recorded comment on modern Indian art is an appreciative response to Ravi Varmā, who imported the British academic style into Indian art and applied it to Indian subjects, especially mythological.

In 1877, when he was just sixteen years old and had begun to compose the lyrics that would form part of Bhānusingha th kurer padābali (The Songs of Bhānusingha Thākur), Rabindranāth Tagore contributed two pieces of prose fiction to the family journal Bhārati, then edited by his eldest brother, Dwijendranāth. The first was a romantic short story, ‘Bhikhārini’ (The Beggar Woman), set in distant Kashmir; the second was the unfinished novel Karunā, twenty-seven chapters of which appeared in Bhārati before the young writer was sent away to Āhmed b d in 1878 to prepare for his journey to England. These very early examples of the two genres in which Rabindranath was later to make major contributions bear few marks of his genius. He was himself dismissive of the excess and artificiality of his youthful productions, and singled out Karunā in particular for its precocious display of bravado. Seven years later, however, he asked the essayist Chandranāth Basu for his opinion of this early novel, to which Chandranath returned a long review praising the work's conception, its comic brilliance, and its social analyses, but pointing out numerous structural flaws, as well as lapses in continuity, characterization, and style of treatment. Expectedly, Rabindranath did not permit either ‘Bhikhārini’ or Karunā to be reprinted in his lifetime. When he asked for Chandranath's comments, he had already completed another novel, this time a slender work of historical fiction, Bauthākurānir hāt (The Young Queen's Market, serialized 1881–2, published 1883). He continued this historical vein in Rājarshi (The Royal Sage, serialized 1885, published 1887).

None of these early narrative exercises would stand comparison with the fiction of his great nineteenth-century predecessor Bankimchandra Chattopādhyāy, whose extraordinary impact upon contemporary readers is memorably described in Tagore's Jibansmriti (Reminiscences). Recalling his own early reading, Rabindranath speaks of his ecstatic surrender to the island romance of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's Paul et Virginie, with its images of remote, sea-girt coconut groves, encountered in Bengali translation in the journal Abodh-bandhu: this was soon matched by the magic of Bankim's evocation of the shadowy forest lining the riverbank in his novel Kapālkundalā.