ON PUBLIC AND PRIVATE IN J. M. COETZEE

This essay reads J. M. Coetzee's Diary of a Bad Year in its historical context (the moment of the US war in Iraq, Abu Graib, Guantanamo and the apparent triumph of neoliberalism), while also probing the problems at stake in the practice of contextual reading and of taking the work as staging the opinions of the biographical Coetzee. The essay teases out not only the question of whether Coetzee should be seen as a public intellectual (the short but not entirely satisfactory answer is no'), but also how the terms public' and private' play out in his oeuvre and are helpful in pondering Coetzee's approach to questions of genre, censorship and authorship.