Narratives of Disability and Illness in the Fiction of J. M. Coetzee

This study offers a detailed analysis of the fiction of J.M. Coetzee, including the novels of the South African and Australian periods, to demonstrate the development of Coetzee’s engagement with the complexities of non-normative embodiment.In this illuminating monograph, Pawel Wojtas demonstrates the extent to which Coetzee’s multifaceted depictions of disability offer a sustained critique of the ableist implications of political violence and neoliberal inclusionism alike.Exploring a wide range of notions, such as ocularnormativism, mute speech, eco-disability, disability Gothic, dismodernism, autogerontography, and bibliotherapy, Wojtas shows how Coetzee’s ‘disabled textuality’ provokes a sustained meditation on various forms of cultural denigration of disability experience.