Modernist Realism and its Enemies: John Coetzee and Philosophy

Abstract

Dispassionate and sober, J. M. Coetzee’s prose is a space in which literary identities are continually unsettled, methodological subtleties both revealed and explored. Given these features, philosophers have described Coetzee’s style as “modernist realist”. In this paper, I discuss the relevance of Coetzee’s use of the split page in Diary of a Bad Year, focusing on its role in undermining “ersatz ethical thought”. In the second part of the paper, I develop a model for explaining Coetzee’s modernist realism. This model is situated within a broader, self-critical project that traces the significance of my analysis for the form of philosophical discourse.