In this book launch talk, Marc Farrant will speak about his 2024 monograph, J. M. Coetzee's Politics of Life and Late Modernism in the Contemporary Novel. Commonly observed as the preeminent Anglophone writer of the last 50 years, the South African Nobel Winning author, J.M. Coetzee, presents to us an often stark and unsettling portrait of life in his works. Across more than a dozen novels as well as critical volumes, Coetzee’s oeuvre constitutes a profound literary thinking of the entanglements and contingencies of both human and non-human modes of being. This book argues that through these explorations we can infer a politics of life that challenges the fundamental tenets of the liberal humanist tradition and suggests an alternative agonistic approach to questions of literary cosmopolitanism and novelistic ethics. But to elaborate this politics - in an effort to think along with Coetzee’s works - J. M. Coetzee's Politics of Life suggests we must first understand how his writing develops out of an engagement with the revolutionary approach to language heralded by literary modernism. In particular, this talk will aim to show how Coetzee’s literary thinking is indebted to the late modernism of Samuel Beckett’s anti-representational aesthetic; the latter's strong distrust of language and logos as doomed to produce yet another 'stain on silence'.

Marc Farrant is a Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Literature at the University of Amsterdam.  His research focuses on the legacies of modernist writing in contemporary literature (especially Samuel Beckett and J.M. Coetzee), the institutional and political history of literary and cultural theory, and most recently the relation between contemporary fiction and debates surrounding the ideology of liberalism in the global anglosphere. His work has appeared in several leading journals, including: Journal of Modern Literature, Critique, LIT, Twentieth Century Literature, MFS and others.