"The narrator of Youth, a student in the South Africa of the 1950s, has long been plotting an escape from his native country: from the stifling love of his mother, from a father whose failures haunt him, and from what he is sure is impending revolution. Studying mathematics, reading poetry, saving money, he tries to ensure that when he arrives in the real world, wherever that may be, he will be prepared to experience life to its full intensity, and transform it into art." "Arriving at last in London, however, he finds neither poetry nor romance. Instead he succumbs to the monotony of life as a computer programmer, from which random, loveless affairs offer no relief. Devoid of inspiration, he stops writing. An awkward colonial, a constitutional outsider, he begins a dark pilgrimage in which he is continually tested and continually found wanting" (Source: Viking publisher's blurb)
Epigraph:
Wer den Diechter will verstehen
muß in Dicheters Lande gehen.
Editions and translations have been updated for Youth: Scenes from Provincial Life by Eilish Copelin as part of a Semester 2, 2013 student internship. The selection and inclusion of these editions and translations was based on their availability through Australian libraries, namely through the search facilities of Libraries Australia and Trove (National Library of Australia).
It has been further extended in the course of a 2014/15 project to create a comprehensive bibliography of Coetzee's works. We believe the record for the novel and its relationship to the revised version in Scenes of Provincial Life is now comprehensive. However, due to the enormous breadth of critical material on Coetzee's work, indexing of secondary sources is not complete.
We are grateful for the author's and Indiana University's Professor Breon Mitchell's assistance in compiling this record.
Boyhood : Scenes from Provincial Life
London
:
Secker and Warburg
,
1997
6309688
1997
single work
novel
Coetzee has been reluctant to talk about himself. Now, revisiting the South Africa of a half century ago, he writes about his childhood and his own interior life. Boyhood's young narrator grew up in a new development north of Cape Town, tormented by guilt and fear. With a father he did not respect, and a mother he both adored and resented, he led a double life - at school the brilliant and well-behaved student, at home the princely despot, always terrified of losing his mother's love. His first encounters with literature, the awakenings of sexual desire, and a growing awareness of apartheid left him with baffling questions; and only in his love of the veld ("farms are places of freedom, of life") could he find a sense of belonging. Bold and telling, this masterly evocation of a young boy's life is the book Coetzee's many admirers have been waiting for, but never could have expected (Source: Libraries Australia).
Summertime : Scenes from Provincial Life
London
:
Harvill Secker
,
2009
Z1596914
2009
single work
novel
(taught in 1 units)
'A young English biographer is working on a book about the late writer, John Coetzee. He plans to focus on the years from 1972 - 1977 when Coetzee, in his thirties, is sharing a run-down cottage in the suburbs of Cape Town with his widowed father. This, the biographer senses, is the period when he was finding his feet as a writer. Never having met Coetzee, he embarks on a series of interviews with people who were important to him: a married woman with whom he had an affair, his favourite cousin Margot, a Brazilian dancer whose daughter had English lessons with him, former friends and colleagues. From their testimony emerges a portrait of the young Coetzee as an awkward, bookish individual with little talent for opening himself to others. Within the family he is regarded as an outsider, someone who tried to flee the tribe and has now returned, chastened. His insistence on doing manual work, his long hair and beard, rumours that he writes poetry evoke nothing but suspicion in the South Africa of the time.
Sometimes heartbreaking, often very funny, Summertime shows us a great writer as he limbers up for his task. It completes the majestic trilogy of fictionalised memoir begun with Boyhood and Youth.' (Provided by the publisher.)
Scenes from Provincial Life
London
:
Harvill Secker
,
2011
Z1804272
2011
single work
novel
J. M. Coetzee's trilogy of fictionalised memoir comprises Boyhood, Youth and Summertime. Although each part has been published separately, they have been collected and revised for publication in this version under the title Scenes from Provincial Life, the sub-title of the component works.
We have decided to list this as a novel, thought it might also have been called autobiography.
Taşra Hayatindan Manzaralar : roman
Suat Ertüzün
(translator),
Istanbul
:
Can Sanat Yayinlari Ltd
,
2011
8129476
2011
selected work
novel
A Turkish omnibus edition that includes translations of Boyhood, Youth and Summertime by J. M. Coetzee.
Barndom, Ungdom, Sommer : 3 bøker i 1
Aud Greiff
(translator),
Oslo
:
Cappelen Damm
,
2012
7717107
2012
selected work
novel
'R. G. (Guy) Howarth (1906-74) was a poet, scholar, teacher and advocate for Australian literature. He was foundation editor of Southerly from 1939 to 1956. From 1955 to 1971 he was Arderne Professor of English Literature in the University of Cape Town, a position he accepted after he was passed over for the prestigious Challis Chair at Sydney University in a disappointment that stayed with him to his premature end.
'In Cape Town Howarth continued his research on English and Australian literature, and began to teach South African writing. In 'Sisters of the South' (1958) he made a case for comparing Australian, New Zealand and South African literature. He introduced a course called Imaginative Writing which J.M. Coetzee took as a student. In Youth (2002), Coetzee's protagonist remembers: 'Howarth, who is an Australian, seems to have taken a liking to him, he cannot see why.' Howarth introduced Coetzee and other UCT students to Australian writers. He encouraged Coetzee to approach Prof Joseph Jones at the University of Texas at Austin about graduate study. Today Coetzee's archive sits with both Howarth's and Jones's in the Harry Ransom Center at UTA.
'Jones saw in Howarth the avatar of 'a new-type literary historian' who would be polymathically able to approach 'all literature in English-as a reticulated if not yet wholly integrated world-phenomenon'. For Coetzee, Howarth is an example of a teacher who 'may not have much of inherent significance to convey' yet can still 'exert a shaping influence on his students'. This long legacy re-opens the question of what happened in Sydney in 1951 where a road blocked for Howarth became a road ahead elsewhere.' (Publication abstract)
Acts of Visitation : The Narrative of J.M. Coetzee
Amsterdam
New York (City)
:
Rodopi
,
2011
Z1880004
2011
single work
criticism
'This study traces, in J.M. Coetzee's fictional and non-fictional production, an imaginative and intellectual masterplot deriving from Coetzee's perception of European presence in (South) Africa as having its origin in an act of illegitimate penetration and fraudulent visitation. In Coetzee's novels, the historical and political problem of a hostile occupation and unfair distribution of the land finds a correspondence in the domestic space of house and farm, and the uneasy cohabitation of its occupants, along with the relation between hosts and guests. The seminal dimension of the categories of penetration and visitation is highlighted, as these are shown to operate not only on a spatial level but also on an epistemological, physical, psychological, hermeneutic, metafictional and ethical one: we encounter literary and psychological secrets that resist decipherment, bodies that cannot be penetrated, writers depicted as intruders, parents that ask to be welcomed by their children.
This study also identifies, in Coetzee's narrative, an ethical proposal grounded on a logic of excess and unconditionality - a logic of 'not enough' - lying behind certain acts of hospitality, friendship, kindness, care, and guidance to the gate of death, acts that may transform prevailing unequal socio-historical conditions and hostile personal relationships, characterized by a logic of parasitism and intrusion. As the figure of the writer progressively gains explicit prominence in Coetzee's literary production, special attention will be paid to it, as it alternately appears as secretary and master, migrant and intruder, pervert and foe, citizen and neighbour. Overall, Acts of Visitation analyzes how Coetzee's works depict the (South) African land, the Karoo farm, the familial household or the writer's and literary character's house as simultaneously contending and redemptive sites in which urgent historical, ethical, and metafictional issues are spatially explored and dramatized.' (Publishers' website)
Works published before Coetzee's arrival in Australia including, Dusklands, In the Heart of the Country, Waiting for the Barbarians, Life & Times of Michael K, Age of Iron, Disgrace, Foe, Boyhood and The Master of Petersburg are also discussed in this critical work.
'In this article, I argue that J.M. Coetzee’s autobiographical trilogy can be read as a set of texts in which the author responds to the problem of cynical self-doubt, as it is described in Coetzee’s writings on confession from the mid-1980s. Against Derek Attridge’s critical view of the relation between Coetzee’s autobiographies and these early writings, I argue that Coetzee’s texts do not passively abide by the author’s early scepticism, but rather inspect the grounds of cynical self-doubt and show its position to be intellectually confused. I specifically demonstrate that Coetzee’s texts present cynical self-doubt as an intellectualisation of akratic failure (weakness of will). The texts not only analyse the crisis from which cynical self-doubt emerges, but also try to look beyond a sceptical perspective. With this in mind, this article will read Coetzee’s autobiographies as writings that “aspire to a condition of gossip”. In this aspiration, the autobiographies point to an ethic of assent they themselves cannot yet fully inhabit.' (Author's abstract)
'R. G. (Guy) Howarth (1906-74) was a poet, scholar, teacher and advocate for Australian literature. He was foundation editor of Southerly from 1939 to 1956. From 1955 to 1971 he was Arderne Professor of English Literature in the University of Cape Town, a position he accepted after he was passed over for the prestigious Challis Chair at Sydney University in a disappointment that stayed with him to his premature end.
'In Cape Town Howarth continued his research on English and Australian literature, and began to teach South African writing. In 'Sisters of the South' (1958) he made a case for comparing Australian, New Zealand and South African literature. He introduced a course called Imaginative Writing which J.M. Coetzee took as a student. In Youth (2002), Coetzee's protagonist remembers: 'Howarth, who is an Australian, seems to have taken a liking to him, he cannot see why.' Howarth introduced Coetzee and other UCT students to Australian writers. He encouraged Coetzee to approach Prof Joseph Jones at the University of Texas at Austin about graduate study. Today Coetzee's archive sits with both Howarth's and Jones's in the Harry Ransom Center at UTA.
'Jones saw in Howarth the avatar of 'a new-type literary historian' who would be polymathically able to approach 'all literature in English-as a reticulated if not yet wholly integrated world-phenomenon'. For Coetzee, Howarth is an example of a teacher who 'may not have much of inherent significance to convey' yet can still 'exert a shaping influence on his students'. This long legacy re-opens the question of what happened in Sydney in 1951 where a road blocked for Howarth became a road ahead elsewhere.' (Publication abstract)
