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.

Pawel Wojtas is an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Artes Liberales, University of Warsaw. He completed his MLitt degree in English Studies at the University of Stirling (2008) and a PhD in Arts and Humanities at the University of Warsaw (2012). He acted as a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the University of York (2018) and The Kosciuszko Foundation Research Fellow at the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin (2022). His main research area involves literary representations of disability in contemporary English and related literary fiction.