J. M. Coetzee's early novels confronted readers with a brute reality stripped of human relation and a prose repeatedly described as spare, stark, intense and lyrical. In this book, Jarad Zimbler explores the emergence of a style forged in Coetzee's engagement with the complexities of South African culture and politics. Tracking the development of this style across Coetzee's first eight novels, from Dusklands to Disgrace, Zimbler compares Coetzee's writing with that of South African authors such as Gordimer, Brink and La Guma, whilst re-examining the nature of Coetzee's indebtedness to modernism and postmodernism. In each case, he follows the threads of Coetzee's own writings on stylistics and rhetoric in order to fix on those techniques of language and narrative used to activate a 'politics of style'. In so doing, Zimbler challenges long-held beliefs about Coetzee's oeuvre, and about the ways in which contemporary literatures of the world are to be read and understood.

Concerned by the eclipse of concerted discussion of literary technique in the postcolonial field, this article outlines a critical practice which would restore questions of technique to the centre ground. Proceeding from the assumption that technique is the agent of art's thinking, it proposes that the literary craft practised in any given work or authorship needs to be thought through in its context of intelligibility: a conception which synthesizes insights of Pierre Bourdieu and Theodor Adorno; particularly their respective notions of field and material. Then, in two short studies, on the critical reception of Louise Bennett in the Caribbean and J. M. Coetzee in South Africa, these concepts are put into motion to illuminate the truth-content of field-defining developments of the literary material.

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