H. Porter Abbott (Professor of English, UCSB)
“Writing Outside of History:  J.M. Coetzee & the Absolute Absence of the Future” 
Friday, December 5, 2003 / 3:30PM
South Hall 2635
Presented by the IHC’s Research Focus Group in Modernist Studies

Professor Abbott will discuss the autobiographical writing of South African author Coetzee, recipient of the 2003 Nobel Prize for Literature. They are strange hybrids. Narrated not only in the third person but also in the present tense, they give little indication that the author is writing about himself. Most distressing for the reviewers, there was no indication in either text that their protagonist would become anything other than a mediocre computer programmer, and certainly not one of the world’s preeminent novelists. Why did he do this? One cannot answer the question fully, but these experiments in autobiography fit well within the singular and controversial way he has developed the themes of both history and narration in all of his fiction from Dusklands (1974) to Elizabeth Costello (2003). They also reflect concerns about his own relation to his writing, implicit traces of which one can also find running through his fiction.

Porter Abbott is Professor of English at UCSB. He teaches and publishes in the areas of narrative, modernism, autobiography, literature and cognition, 19th and 20th-century literature, and the literary dissemination of  evolutionary ideas. His latest books are Beckett Writing Beckett: the Author in the Autograph (1996) and The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative (2002). He recently edited a special issue of Substance titled On the Origin of Fictions: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (2001).

An optional excerpt of Youth is available for photocopying in the English Department Office, South Hall 2607, in the bin at Renee Meuret’s station.


Top of Page

<<Back