J. M. Coetzee and the Idea of the Public Intellectual addresses the contribution Coetzee has made to contemporary literature, not least for the contentious forays his work makes into South African political discourse and the field of postcolonial studies.

This book presents J. M. Coetzee's work as a complex, nuanced counterblast to contemporary, global, neoliberal economics and its societies. Not surprisingly, given his many years in South Africa and Australia, Coetzee writes from a `global-Southern' perspective. Drawing on a wealth ofliterature, philosophy, and theory, this book reads Coetzee's writings as a discreet, oblique but devastating engagement with neoliberal presumptions.It identifies and focuses on various key features of neoliberal culture: its obsession with self-enrichment, mastery, growth; its belief in plenitude, endless resources; its hubris and obsession with (self)-promotion; its desire for ease and easiness, `well-being', euphoria; its fetishization ofmanagerial reason and the culture of security; its unrelenting positivity, its belief in illusory goods and trivial progressivisms. By contrast, Coetzee's writings explore the virtues of irony and self-reduction. He commits himself to difficulty, discomfort, patient and austere, if bleak, inquiry,rigorous questioning, and radical doubt. Destitution and failure come to look like a serious, dignified form of life and thought. The very tones of Coetzee's books run counter to those of our neoliberal democracies. They point in a different direction to an age that has gone astray.

Addressing a neglected dimension in postcolonial scholarship, Oliver Lovesey examines the figure of the postcolonial intellectual as repeatedly evoked by the fabled troika of Said, Spivak, and Bhabha and by members of the pan-African diaspora such as Cabral, Fanon, and James. Lovesey’s primary focus is Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, one of the greatest writers of post-independence Africa. Ngũgĩ continues to be a vibrant cultural agitator and innovator who, in contrast to many other public intellectuals, has participated directly in grassroots cultural renewal, enduring imprisonment and exile as a consequence of his engagement in political action. Lovesey’s comprehensive study concentrates on Ngũgĩ’s non-fictional prose writings, including his largely overlooked early journalism and his most recent autobiographical and theoretical work. He offers a postcolonial critique that acknowledges Ngũgĩ’s complex position as a virtual spokesperson for the oppressed and global conscience who now speaks from a location of privilege. Ngũgĩ’s writings, Lovesey shows, display a seemingly paradoxical consistency in their concerns over nearly five decades at the same time that there have been enormous transformations in his ideology and a shift in his focus from Africa’s holocaust to Africa’s renaissance. Lovesey argues that Ngũgĩ’s view of the intellectual has shifted from an alienated, nearly neocolonial stance to a position that allows him to celebrate intellectual activism and a return to the model of the oral vernacular intellectual even as he challenges other global intellectuals. Tracing the development of this notion of the postcolonial intellectual, Lovesey argues for Ngũgĩ’s rightful position as a major postcolonial theorist who helped establish postcolonial studies.

Nobel Laureate and the first author to win the Booker Prize twice, J.M. Coetzee is perhaps the world's leading living novelist writing in English. Including an international roster of world leading critics and novelists, and drawing on new research, this innovative book analyses the whole range of Coetzee's work, from his most recent novels through his memoirs and critical writing. It offers a range of perspectives on his relationship with the historical, political, cultural and social context of South Africa. It also contextualises Coetzee's work in relation to his literary influences, colonial and post-colonial history, the Holocaust and colonial genocides, the 'politics' and meaning of the Nobel prize in South Africa and Coetzee's very public move from South Africa to Australia. Including a major unpublished essay by leading South African novelist André Brink, this book offers the most up-to-date study of Coetzee's work currently available.

New essays providing critical views of Coetzee's major works for the scholar and the general reader. J. M. Coetzee is perhaps the most critically acclaimed bestselling author of imaginative fiction writing in English today. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003 and is the first writer to have been awarded two BookerPrizes. The present volume makes critical views of this important writer accessible to the general reader as well as the scholar, discussing Coetzee's main works in chronological order and introducing the dominant themes in the academic discussion of his oeuvre. The volume highlights Coetzee's exceptionally nuanced approach to writing as both an exacting craft and a challenging moral-ethical undertaking. It discusses Coetzee's complex relation to apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa, the land of his birth, and evaluates his complicated responses to the literary canon. Coetzee emerges as both a modernist and a highly self-aware postmodernist - a champion of the truths of aliterary enterprise conducted unrelentingly in the mode of self-confession. Contributors: Chris Ackerley, Derek Attridge, Carrol Clarkson, Simone Drichel, Johan Geertsema, David James, Michelle Kelly, Sue Kossew, MikeMarais, James Meffan, Tim Mehigan, Chris Prentice, Engelhard Weigl, Kim L. Worthington. Tim Mehigan is Professor of Languages in the Department of Languages and Cultures at the University of Otago, New Zealand and Honorary Professor in the Department of Languages and Comparative Cultural Studies at the University of Queensland, Australia.

How can we talk about World Literature if we do not actually examine the world as a whole? Research on World Literature commonly focuses on the dynamics of a western center and a southern periphery, ignoring the fact that numerous literary relationships exist beyond these established constellations of thinking and reading within the Global South. Re-Mapping World Literature suggests a different approach that aims to investigate new navigational tools that extend beyond the known poles and meridians of current literary maps. Using the example of Latin American literatures, this study provides innovative insights into the literary modeling of shared historical experiences, epistemological crosscurrents, and book market processes within the Global South which thus far have received scant attention. The contributions to this volume, from renowned scholars in the fields of World and Latin American literatures, assess travelling aesthetics and genres, processes of translation and circulation of literary works, as well as the complex epistemological entanglements and shared worldviews between Latin America, Africa and Asia. A timely book that embraces highly innovative perspectives, it will be a must-read for all scholars involved in the field of the global dimensions of literature.

The Sublime Today considers contemporary applications of aesthetic philosophy and earlier theories of the sublime from Longinus, Boileau, Burke, Kant, and Hegel to current literary and cultural contexts. Today, aesthetic experience itself seems to be changing, given the rise of new media and new conditions for the viewing and the reception of works of art. How might the rhetoric of the sublime be used to both describe our current situation and help formulate constructive responses to it? The Sublime Today collects the work of scholars in literature, film, art, and media studies and provides a forum for investigating the contemporary relevance of the sublime, both as it has been understood historically and as it has been formulated by more recent theorists such as Jameson, Lyotard, Kristeva, and others. The volume includes essays on literary readings of the sublime in Coetze, Eggers, Lahiri, and Auster; essays on film and the visual arts in the work of François Ozon and in recent participatory art; and essays on how new technologies and media, as in media representations of 9/11, re-frame our relationship to the aesthetics of the sublime, especially as they intersect with questions of gender, the postcolonial, and the uneasy politics of terror.