Coetzee's Women Narrators - Professor Carrol Clarkson (University of the Western Cape)

In this lecture, Professor Carrol Clarkson from the University of the Western Cape discusses J.M. Coetzee’s women narrators, examining the roles and complexities of female voices in his works. Professor Clarkson explores how Coetzee constructs the narrators' unique perspectives in navigating power dynamics, trauma, and agency. Offering intertextual analysis of key comparator texts including Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, Professor Clarkson reveals how Coetzee's portrayal of women raises broader societal and philosophical questions about identity and voice.

Further Reading

David Attwell, J.M. Coetzee & The Life of Writing (Oxford University Press, 2015)

Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813; Penguin, 2003)

Breyten Breytenbach, The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist (Harvest, 1984)

Carrol Clarkson, J.M. Coetzee: Countervoices (Palgrave, 2009)

J.M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello (Secker and Warburg, 2003)

---, The Pole and Other Stories (Liveright, 2023)

Lucy Valerie Graham and Andrew van der Vlies, eds., The Bloomsbury Handbook to J.M. Coetzee (Bloomsbury 2023)

James Joyce, Ulysses (1922; Penguin, 2011)

Dominic Head, The Cambridge Introduction to J.M. Coetzee (Cambridge University Press, 2012)

Franz Kafka, The Trial (1925; Oxford University Press, 2009)

Sue Kossew and Melinda Harvey, eds., Reading Coetzee’s Women (Springer, 2019)

Italo Svevo, As A Man Grows Older (1898; trans. 1932, republished New York Review Books, 2001)

Jarad Zimbler, ed., The Cambridge Companion to J.M. Coetzee (Cambridge University Press, 2020)