Disability representation in fiction and the effect it has on the reader

Introduction

John M. Coetzee was born in a middle class family in South Africa. His parents were from Africa and German heritage, but he wrote only in English. The awards and the critical acclaim were not unexpected, since Coetzee's seven previous novels (notably waiting for the Barbarians and Life & Times of Michael) had by then secured their author a prodigious international reputation and made him the subject of intense scholarly attention and discussion. The surprise of Disgrace was its popular success.

While Coetzee's career had previously been defined mainly by succès d'estime, Disgrace was a publisher's dream come true: a novel by a high-prestige author that appealed to a large audience. That appeal could be attributed equally to its lurid content, as well as its privileged access to a distant world and its feel of raw history in the making. But the X-factor of Disgrace , the quality that above all accounted for its becoming Coetzee's most widely read novel, then and now, was its conventional fictional strategy: in a word, its realism.

Slow man explores the themes of migration, transnationalism and authorship, and casts doubt on the notion of the nation as a fixed category and value. Recognizing the link between the works that allows us to know about the development in the 21st century fiction Coetzee, in which the work of the author seems to insist on the construction of the literary world after Coetzee. The many inter-textual traces of Coetzee's previous novels, in the latter, to create as I believe, para-text to his readers to judge their work, to participate in the para-text nationality - South Africanness - which are still the most influential reading and evaluation of novel Coetzee.

Discussion

Just as significant as the spatial frame in the comments from Dagens Nyheter the temporal: European expansion may have been in retreat for some time in different regions of the globe but it ended, he says, in the mid-twentieth century; in other words, k is the experience of his particular generation of settler-colonials to live out the end of Empire and decolonization ("live out" is his verb--later in the interview he says he has lived out this history in his writing as much as in his day-to-day life).

To Coetzee's generation, decolonization is a form of profound disernbcdding--a term used by Anthony Giddens in a different context to account for the consequences of modernity (21-28). Decolonization produces a post-imperial disembedding, just as much as it enables some national cultures to acquire self-definition. The disembedding to which Coctzee alludes is a function of decolonization and it begins to acquire self-consciousness when settler-colonial diasporas arise from what Coetzee calls failed or failing settlements which take people back to the metropoles or on to more successful colonizing cultures. Caribbean and post-Ugandan-Asian Britons were pioneering communities in this process of self-definition, and although their circumstances are politically quite different, the descendants of white settlers, whom we might call re-settlers, will follow their example. Famously, metropolitan ...