Alert! It’s been a while since you’ve read JM Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians, hasn’t it. Go on, own up, we’re all friends here.
Well, get cracking on that, because you’ll to want to walk into the next Great Texts / Big Questions lecture at UCT Hiddingh’s campus prepared to rap on the third novel from “the best Afrikaans novelist to emerge in the last decade” – as Martin Seymour-Smith called Coetzee in late 70s, after the previous book, In the Heart of the Country, was first published.
The event serves as the coming out party for UCT English Department prof Caroll Clarkson’s new work on on the Nobel winner – pictured here as he is on the dust jacket of a first edition of Barbarians – called JM Coetzee: Countervoices.
From the blurb on Clarkson’s book:
Clarkson pays sustained attention to the dynamic interaction between Coetzee’s fiction and his critical writing, exploring the Nobel prize-winner’s participation in, and contribution to, contemporary literary-philosophical debates. The book sets out by examining Coetzee’s preoccupation with language, and opens onto a consideration of the ethical and aesthetic implications of the writer’s linguistic choices.
Clarkson’s free lecture is sponsored by the Gordon Institute for Performing and Creative Arts (GIPCA); here’s a snippet from their press release:
GIPCA’s Great Texts / Big Questions popular lecture series provides an opportunity to hear a leading intellectual discuss one of life’s “big questions” or a significant book or artwork. The great texts under discussion in Clarkson’s lecture are Waiting for the Barbarians and Disgrace. The publication of Waiting for the Barbarians confirmed Coetzee’s standing as a novelist of international repute; Disgrace is Coetzee’s most widely discussed – and his most controversial work, not least because of the novel’s winning of the Booker Prize in 1999, the charges of racism lodged against the novel at the Human Rights Commission, and the recent release of the film, Disgrace, starring John Malkovich.
Clarkson’s research interests lie in the philosophy of language and in post apartheid South African literature and art. Her most recent publication is her book on Coetzee, entitled J.M. Coetzee: Countervoices. In her GIPCA lecture she will be asking a big question about the limits of literary representation, with specific reference to Waiting for the Barbarians and Disgrace.
See you there, like!
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