Before the Council, the renewal of moral theology plays itself out very differently on either side of the Atlantic. In the aftermath of World War II, European moral theologians develop a moral theology based on the responsibility of the personal conscience. In the United States, moral theologians rebuff these initiatives and seek to maintain the authority of a magisterial tradition. The promulgation of Humanae vitae occasions a crisis that leads many of the latter moral theologians to reconsider the contributions of their European counterparts.

This chapter first outlines the preconciliar, largely Christocentric perspective that formed the foundation for the ecclesiology of the Second Vatican Council. As the Council proceeded it complemented this Christological understanding of the church with increasing awareness of the ecclesial role of the Holy Spirit. The eschatological framework of the final documents and the analogy made between ecclesial and Trinitarian koinonia are two notable effects of this rebalancing of Word and Spirit.

The council recovered a more eschatological understanding of the church as a pilgrim people. This emphasis on the “pilgrim” character of the church would prove among the major factors in bringing about the transformation of the self-understanding of the church, thereby providing a theological opening for the council’s program of aggiornamento. Combined with the emergence of an equally dynamic and open-ended pneumatological emphasis in conciliar ecclesiological thinking, this “eschatological turn” helped create conditions for the possibility of major ecclesial renewal and reform. This chapter will consider the emergence and development of such ecclesiological elements in the council’s vision, considering the key particular texts that specifically gave expression to this open-ended sense of the church’s life, mission, and relationship to the wider world.

This chapter begins by describing some of the main lines of influence on Coetzee, including major literary figures, philosophical and theological traditions, and a range of South African writers and thinkers. It distinguishes the psychoanalytic and philosophical registers in which the concept of intertextuality has been discussed by such figures as Roland Barthes and Julia Kristeva, as well as (more implicitly) by writers including Fyodor Dostoevsky and Samuel Beckett. Most broadly, it develops an argument that Coetzee was not simply influenced by this way of thinking about the nature and value of literature. Instead, his fiction can be understood as a complex engagement with both the imaginative power and the moral problems that it generates.

This chapter offers a framework for understanding how the work gathered under the sign ‘J. M. Coetzee’ has reached – and been received – by multiple publics, from agents, editors, and publishers to a range of readers including critics, censors, interviewers, and literary prize judges. It considers the role of institutional mediation in the processes of making meaning, also highlighting some of the ways in which Coetzee has had to navigate amongst complex local and global value-conferring operations in the service of making a career, yet has sought too to disrupt the terms under which cultural capital accrues. Addressing the circuitous routes through which his first books, Dusklands and In the Heart of the Country, reached their first readers (and elicited a range of responses), the chapter also considers a number of controversies in the 1980s that served as flashpoints for Coetzee’s negotiation of the demand that a writer speak, in certain circumstances, in their own person. Finally, it assesses the impact of these processes and contexts for such later works as Elizabeth Costello and Diary of a Bad Year and occasions such as Coetzee’s Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech and his many public readings and other interventions since.

J. M. Coetzee has several points of contact with translation: as a translator, as a translated author, and as a critic and scholar. After discussing Coetzee’s relationship to languages and language learning, this chapter briefly analyses two of Coetzee’s translations from Afrikaans, of The Expedition to the Baobab Tree by Wilma Stockenström and of ‘Eden’ by Ina Rousseau, before reflecting on Coetzee’s views of translation expressed directly in ‘Working with Translators’ and indirectly in sections of Diary of a Bad Year as well as Coetzee’s occasional writings on Samuel Beckett. The chapter finishes with a consideration of the impact of translation on Coetzee’s prose style.

Music, dance, film, and photography have been a consistent feature of J. M. Coetzee’s fiction. The importance of these ‘other arts’ has been reinforced by recent biographical and archive-based accounts of the author’s life and work, with further evidence of the creative energy given to possible and realized adaptations and collaborations with artists, composers, and film-makers. This chapter explores a selection of references to these other arts from across the Coetzee corpus, with particular attention to the representation of aesthetic experience, claims about the distinctive capacities of non-literary art forms, and the relationship of these other arts to writing, self-reflexivity, and the body. It concludes with a consideration of adaptations of the novels for film and opera.

This chapter examines Coetzee’s creative and scholarly engagements with literary style, beginning with his earliest novel Dusklands and moving across his corpus to track his complexly evolving use of style’s emotional, ethical, and political affordances. Apparently distinct, even diverging impulses – one embracing grace and euphony, the other committing to verbal thrift and minimalism – coalesce across Coetzee’s career, soliciting complicated affective responses from his readers to the inflections and connotations of novelistic discourse. It is critically tempting see Coetzee as a kind of stern gatekeeper of formal restraint: a writer who shuns the consolations of style and who forestalls the pleasures his readers might take in elegantly wrought language, by investing instead in a kind of syntactic austerity and bareness. In practice, however, his fiction doesn’t always behave in this manner, as beautifully paced, rhetorically supple sequences from Age of Iron, Disgrace, and The Schooldays of Jesus attest.

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.