14 - Publics and Personas

Summary

This chapter offers a framework for understanding how the work gathered under the sign ‘J. M. Coetzee’ has reached – and been received – by multiple publics, from agents, editors, and publishers to a range of readers including critics, censors, interviewers, and literary prize judges. It considers the role of institutional mediation in the processes of making meaning, also highlighting some of the ways in which Coetzee has had to navigate amongst complex local and global value-conferring operations in the service of making a career, yet has sought too to disrupt the terms under which cultural capital accrues. Addressing the circuitous routes through which his first books, Dusklands and In the Heart of the Country, reached their first readers (and elicited a range of responses), the chapter also considers a number of controversies in the 1980s that served as flashpoints for Coetzee’s negotiation of the demand that a writer speak, in certain circumstances, in their own person. Finally, it assesses the impact of these processes and contexts for such later works as Elizabeth Costello and Diary of a Bad Year and occasions such as Coetzee’s Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech and his many public readings and other interventions since.