Overview

Speaking about his early experiments with the camera, the Nobel Prize winning novelist J. M. Coetzee acknowledged the seminal influence of images on his writing: 'The marks of photography and of the cinema are all over my work, from the beginning.' This book presents an archivally grounded examination of the influence of the camera on Coetzee's creative practice, providing insights that can help us read the novels in new ways. In this comprehensive examination of the formative role that photographic images play in Coetzee's oeuvre, Wittenberg offers evidence from biographical and archival sources, Coetzee's own critical writings, and the whole range of fictions themselves to gauge the extent of Coetzee's visual imagination. This book argues that the images that Coetzee writes into his fictions are charged with an affective and ethical force that connects them to larger questions relating to the truth, a relationship in which the autobiographical self is implicated.

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9781009548342

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Hermann Wittenberg, born in Cape Town, has worked extensively in the field of South African literature, including the fictions of J. M. Coetzee. He has strong interests in archival studies, the intersection of literature, film and photography, as well as writing on indigeneity and ecology. He has edited two of Coetzee's film scripts which were published as Two Screenplays (2014), and curated the international 'Photographs from Boyhood' exhibition (2017-20), which was subsequently published as a photobook with the same title (2020). He has co-edited the book J.M. Coetzee and the Archive. Fiction, Theory and Autobiography (2021), and convened the 'Dusklands 50' anniversary conference in Cape Town in 2024, which marked the publication of Coetzee's debut work of fiction. He is a Professor of English at the University of the Western Cape.

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