Reading J. M. Coetzee’s Letters

Dear Colleagues,

J.M. Coetzee’s oeuvre displays a conspicuous fascination with the epistolary genre. Letters play an important narratological role in early novels, such as Life and Times of Michael K (1983) and Foe (1986), where Susan Barton’s letters to her author Foe remain unanswered and, most explicitly, in Age of Iron (1990), a novel written in the form of a letter from Elizabeth Curren to her expatriated daughter in America. Elizabeth Costello (2003) famously ends with a postscript written in the form of a fictional letter from Elizabeth, Lady Chandos, to Francis Bacon. But letters also play an important role also in Coetzee’s fictionalized autobiographies and in his recent trilogy, The Childhood of Jesus (2013), The Schooldays of Jesus (2016), and The Death of Jesus (2019). Coetzee has famously engaged also in written dialogues and letter exchanges with writers and academics (with David Attwell in Doubling the Point, 1991), and most recently with novelist Paul Auster in Here and Now: Letters, 2008-2011 (2013) and with the psychotherapist Arabella Kurtz in The Good Story: Exchanges on Truth, Fiction and Psychotherapy (2015).

What are we to make of such a sophisticated ‘epistolarium’? Rita Barnard has shown how Coetzee’s work has always been interested in forms and genres that “exploit the tension between private and public” (“On Public and Private in J.M. Coetzee”, p 446). In what is the first sustained scholarly article on Coetzee’s fascination for epistolary exchanges, Rachel Bower has argued that letter writing is “central” to Coetzee’s oeuvre and to the “the dialectical dialogue” that underpins his writing (in “Collaboration and Correspondence”, The Cambridge Companion to J.M. Coetzee, 2020, p. 136).

The aim of this Special Issue on ‘Reading J. M. Coetzee’s Letters’ is to examine Coetzee’s interest in the epistolary genre. We want to turn the letter into a ‘focal genre’ of Coetzee’s work to revisit the oeuvre from an ‘epistolary centre’ or ‘matrix’ and to offer a more sustained and systematic analysis of this malleable and protean form, both in light of existing hermeneutical paradigms within Coetzee scholarship and of the more recent ‘archival turn’ (Farrant, Easton, and Wittenberg). The purpose is to illuminate Coetzee’s authorship in new ways that foreground innovative aesthetics and reflect the constant and dynamic intertwining of the private and the public.

How and when do letters surface in Coetzee’s novels? How does this relate to questions of action, the plot, focalization, and the potential polyphony of literary discourse? How has Coetzee’s representation of letters changed across the oeuvre? Can we hypothesise an ‘epistolary poetics’ at the core of Coetzee’s writing? How does the fascination for letter writing intersect with Coetzee’s attraction for heterotopic spaces (islands, frontiers, and isolated farms)? What is the connection between epistolary exchanges and the production or generation (rather than expression) of affective and emotional worlds? Given Coetzee’s relentless interest in the limits of self-knowledge, writing, speech, and authorship, which roles do letters fulfil in the process of self-inquiry, self-writing, and potentially ‘self-inquisition’? Can letters be considered specific reading or writing ‘events’ (Attridge; Attwell)? How does Coetzee’s use of epistolarity relate to ‘textual transvestism’ (Graham)?

These are some of the many questions this Special Issue aims to address.

The suggested topics may include (but are not limited to) the following:

• Coetzee’s fiction and the tradition of the epistolary novel;
• Letter writing, authorship and questions of canonization;
• Epistolary narratological strategies (action, characterization, and focalization);
• Letters and the novel’s polyphony;
• The ‘I and Thou’ relationship (Buber);
• Letter writing and the trial of/on/by the self;
• The role of letters in Coetzee’s fictional memoirs; epistolary selves;
• Letter writing and ‘textual transvestism’ (L. Graham);
• Genre crossings/hybridity between confessional and epistolary narratives;
• Epistolary aesthetics;
• Coetzee, letters, and the archive;
• Epistolarity, apartheid and questions of reciprocity;
• Letters as reading and writing ‘events’ (Attridge and Attwell);
• Letters and affect;
• Letters, trauma, and ‘the work of mourning’ (Durrant);
• Fictional postscripts and philosophical enquiries;
• The materiality of letters;
• Epistolary modes and ‘heterotopic’ spaces (Foucault).

Dr. Michela Borzaga
Guest Editor

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• epistolary Coetzee
• epistolary novel and Coetzee’s writings
• epistolary poetics
• letters and authorship
• letters as literary ‘events’
• Coetzee’s letters and the archive
• letters and heterotopic spaces
• epistolarity and trauma