image of person or book cover 7170946608107880780.jpg
This image has been sourced from online.
y separately published work icon In the Heart of the Country single work   novel  
Issue Details: First known date: 1977... 1977 In the Heart of the Country
The material on this page is available to AustLit subscribers. If you are a subscriber or are from a subscribing organisation, please log in to gain full access. To explore options for subscribing to this unique teaching, research, and publishing resource for Australian culture and storytelling, please contact us or find out more.

Adaptations

form y separately published work icon Dust Marion Hänsel , ( dir. Marion Hänsel ) France Belgium : Daska Films Flach Film France 3 Cinéma Man's Films , 1986 8035726 1986 single work film/TV

The isolated lives of a white father and daughter on a South African farm are disrupted by the arrival of black farm-workers, and the resulting racial and sexual tension.

In the Heart of the Country J. M. Coetzee , 2014 single work screenplay
— Appears in: Two Screenplays 2014;

Notes

  • Sections 85-94 have appeared in South Africa in the magazine Standpunte 124, August 1976.
  • Editions and translations have been updated for Disgrace by Eilish Copelin as part of a Semester 2, 2013 scholar's internship. The selection and inclusion of these editions and translations was based on their availability through the search facilities of Libraries Australia andTrove (National Library of Australia), as well as UNESCO's Index Translationum.

    Given the international popularity of Coetzee's work, however, this record may not yet comprehensive. Due to the enormous breadth of critical material on Coetzee's work, indexing of secondary sources is also not complete.

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

    • London,
      c
      England,
      c
      c
      United Kingdom (UK),
      c
      Western Europe, Europe,
      :
      Secker and Warburg ,
      1977 .
      Extent: 138p.
      Edition info: First UK ed.
      ISBN: 9780436256707, 0436256703
    • New York (City), New York (State),
      c
      United States of America (USA),
      c
      Americas,
      :
      Harper and Row ,
      1977 .
      image of person or book cover 7170946608107880780.jpg
      This image has been sourced from online.
      Alternative title: From the Heart of the Country
      Extent: 138p.
      Edition info: First US ed.
      Note/s:
      • Published in the US as 'From the Heart of the Country'
      ISBN: 006010841X, 9780060108410
    • Johannesburg,
      c
      South Africa,
      c
      Southern Africa, Africa,
      :
      Ravan Press ,
      1978 .
      Extent: 138p.
      Edition info: First South African ed.
      ISBN: 0869750771, 9780869750773
    • London,
      c
      England,
      c
      c
      United Kingdom (UK),
      c
      Western Europe, Europe,
      :
      Penguin Books ,
      1982 .
      Extent: 138p.
      ISBN: 9780140062281, 0140062289
    • London,
      c
      England,
      c
      c
      United Kingdom (UK),
      c
      Western Europe, Europe,
      :
      Vintage UK ,
      1999 .
      image of person or book cover 4273502129267206645.jpg
      This image has been sourced from online.
      Extent: 151p.
      ISBN: 0749394250 (pbk), 9780749394257
    • London,
      c
      England,
      c
      c
      United Kingdom (UK),
      c
      Western Europe, Europe,
      :
      Vintage UK ,
      2004 .
      image of person or book cover 7693709870271231491.jpg
      This image has been sourced from online.
      Extent: 151p.
      ISBN: 0099465949, 9780099465942
    • Melbourne, Victoria,: Text Publishing , 2019 .
      image of person or book cover 772013073534195616.jpg
      Image courtesy of publisher's website.
      Extent: 192p.p.
      Note/s:
      • Published 1 October 2019.
      ISBN: 9781922268099
Alternative title: Au coeur de ce pays
Language: French
    • Paris,
      c
      France,
      c
      Western Europe, Europe,
      :
      Éditions Maurice Nadeau ,
      1985 .
      image of person or book cover 7243152689004858922.jpg
      This image has been sourced from online.
      Extent: 186p.
      Reprinted: 1998
      Note/s:
      • This edition published under the title 'Dust : au cœur de ce pays : roman', and with the following note: "Précédemment paru sous le titre : 'Au cœur de ce pays'".
      ISBN: 2862310352, 29782862310350
    • Paris,
      c
      France,
      c
      Western Europe, Europe,
      :
      C. Bourgois ,
      1989 .
      Extent: 186p.
      ISBN: 2264014121, 9782264014122
      Series: y separately published work icon Série Domaine étranger Paris : Éditions Maurice Nadeau , 1988 8057681 1988 series - publisher novel Number in series: 2042
    • Paris,
      c
      France,
      c
      Western Europe, Europe,
      :
      Le Serpent à plumes ,
      1999 .
      image of person or book cover 1779069181472676825.jpg
      This image has been sourced from online.
      Extent: 222p.
      Reprinted: 2003
      ISBN: 2842611160, 9782842611163
      Series: Motifs series - publisher novel Number in series: 74
    • Paris,
      c
      France,
      c
      Western Europe, Europe,
      :
      Editions du Seuil ,
      2006 .
      image of person or book cover 2826481736749549968.jpg
      Image courtesy of publisher's website.
      Extent: 221p.
      ISBN: 2020676516, 9782020676519
    • Paris,
      c
      France,
      c
      Western Europe, Europe,
      :
      Points ,
      2007 .
      image of person or book cover 5502230019315877155.png
      Image courtesy of publisher's website.
      Extent: 221p.
      ISBN: 2757807188, 9782757807187
      Series: y separately published work icon Points Paris : Points , 1970- 8020796 1970 series - publisher novel Number in series: 1846

Other Formats

  • Also sound recording.

Works about this Work

In the Heart of the Country Ian Glenn , 2023 single work criticism
— Appears in: The Bloomsbury Handbook to J. M. Coetzee 2023; (p. 81-90)
An Unrecorded Grammar : Speaking Embodiment in J. M. Coetzee’s “In the Heart of the Country” Ellen Kriz , 2020 single work criticism
— Appears in: Transnational Literature , November no. 12 2020;
'This essay seeks to understand how J. M. Coetzee's In the Heart of the Country elaborates a response to the suffering body through linguistic indeterminacy, including its formal and structural presentation of numbered and often contradictory passages and through the liminality of the narrator Magda's consciousness. Grounding the paper on the possibility that In the Heart of the Country functions through its lacunae, I argue that Magda rewrites the oppressive language she has inherited by pointing to realities words cannot grasp, including the irreducible witness of the body in pain. The body stands as an incontrovertible presence just outside the reach of language, where, in its refusal to be codified, it catalyses new, transgressive attempts at speaking. Such attempts function as a body-speech that could transform the speaking-about of Magda's monologue into the speaking-to of reciprocity. It is a language that Magda, however, ultimately fails to articulate. She remains suspended in potentiality, reading the signals "in conformations of face and hands" that communicate, incompletely, the mysteries of another's being. But perhaps the act of speaking to another must always remain poised on the brink of failure: response to the unknown of another's being requires an unrecorded grammar. Thus, in the lacunae of his unfixed text, Coetzee offers a linguistic event as response to actual suffering.' (Publication summary)
 
Reading Coetzee Expectantly : From Magda to Lucy Martina Ghosh-Schellhorn , 2019 single work criticism
— Appears in: Reading Coetzee's Women 2019; (p. 205-219)
Contrasts Magda in In the Heart of the Country and Lucy in Disgrace, with a particular focus on the extent to which changes in narrative approach facilitate or block access to a character's interiority.
Seeing Where Others See Nothing : Coetzee’s Magda, Cassandra in the Karoo Susanna Zinato , 2019 single work criticism
— Appears in: Reading Coetzee's Women 2019; (p. 183-201)
Analyses the character of Magda in In the Heart of the Country through oblique allusions to Greek drama, particularly Aeschylus' Oresteia trilogy, Agamemnon, and Euripides' Trojan Women.
Attuning Philosophy and Literary Criticism : A Response to In the Heart of the Country Maximilian de Gaynesford , 2018 single work criticism
— Appears in: Beyond the Ancient Quarrel : Literature, Philosophy, and J.M. Coetzee 2018;
The Gate Deferred : J.M. Coetzee and the Battle Against Doubt Scott Esposito , 2013 single work criticism
— Appears in: Southerly , vol. 73 no. 3 2013; (p. 90-111)
'Esposito writes of Coetzee's characters (it is not Elizabeth Costello alone) in effect morally naked at the Gate, awaiting admission after - or so they think - the passing of a last judgement, but what is it that is expected of them, and what is this a gate to? (David Brooks, 'Editorial' p. 6)
Horizons Not Only of Expectation : Lessons from In the Heart of the Country Martina Ghosh-Schellhorn , 2014 single work criticism
— Appears in: Approaches to Teaching Coetzee's Disgrace and Other Works 2014; (p. 49-58)
Restoring Madness to History in J.M. Coetzee’s In the Heart of the Country 2014 single work
— Appears in: MediaTropes , vol. 4 no. 2 2014; (p. 46-67)
'This article interrogates the curious dismissal of madness from the critical landscape surrounding J. M. Coetzee’s In the Heart of the Country, and makes suggestions concerning how madness works in the novel and why—given certain critical and historical pressures—it has been persistently sidelined. An analysis of the novel in light of Coetzee’s scholarship on Samuel Beckett suggests that Magda’s discourse, like those of many Beckettian narrators, follows patterns of affirmation and auto-negation, constituting a fiction of what Coetzee calls “net zero.” In particular, Magda extends this pattern to the taking on and casting off of identities, perhaps in the style of the hermit crab she puts forward as an image of herself. An intertextual examination of the semantic and rhetorical range of madness as it appears in Coetzee’s other fiction and scholarship reveals that madness, for Coetzee, consistently denotes: on the one hand, a contagious force moving throughout a social body, and on the other hand, the labor of writing under the threat of illegibility—a threat conditioned in large part by the madness of the social body. By infecting the writer who might record its workings in history and thereby inhibiting or distorting that record, madness likewise appears in historical record as “net zero.” Thus, rather than simply being mad, Magda’s relationship with madness is emblematic of the (dis)appearance of madness in and from history.' (Publication abstract)
Magda Meets Theodora : Language and Interiority in The Aunt’s Story and In The Heart of the Country Bill Ashcroft , 2018 single work criticism
— Appears in: Australian Literary Studies , February vol. 33 no. 1 2018;

'In ‘Orders of Discourse’ Foucault raises the deeply embedded opposition between reason and folly: ‘From the depths of the Middle Ages a man was mad if his speech could not be said to form part of the common discourse of men’. This discursive rule becomes magnified in the case of women and of the colonised. In Coetzee’s In the Heart of the Country and Patrick White’s The Aunt’s Story, Magda and Theodora demonstrate the precarious marginality of the colonial woman. They are doubly marginalised as colonial women, existing outside settler history, which is the narrative both of the masculine responsibilities of settlement and an attendant sense of displacement. In Coetzee’s novel, Magda plays out a version of The Tempest in which she is subjected both to the Law of the Father and to Caliban, while in The Aunt’s Story Theodora plots a determined path out of the discourse of men into the ambivalently liberating horizon of madness. The differences between the women say as much as the similarities, but both offer a compelling version of the layered marginalities of the female colonial subject. In the writers’ hands the place outside discourse, the peculiar language of the colonial women, becomes the potential location of counter discourse. This essay proposes that the women demonstrate a radical interiority, a capacity to inhabit the lives of others in a way that is considered madness but which enacts the utopian function of literature itself.' (Publication abstract)

In the Heart of the Country and Pain : Re-reading Space, Gender and Affect Michela Borzaga , 2018 single work criticism
— Appears in: Australian Literary Studies , February vol. 33 no. 1 2018;

'This essay offers a new spatial reading of In the Heart of the Country. It explores J. M. Coetzee’s interest in grounding white female narrators in heterotopic spaces which, while marked by terror and racial divisions, simultaneously enforce proximity and intimacy across the racial bar. It shows that grounding Magda within the specific phenomenology of the farm enables Coetzee to explore a set of traumatic double-binds which are not only discursive but also sensorial, psychic as well as affective. It concludes by arguing that the strong self-referentiality of the novel can itself be read as an affective symptom, the trace of psychic parceling which happens at the intersection of space, symbol and traumatic power relations.'  (Publication abstract)

Last amended 1 May 2024 13:17:55
X