Alumnus and Nobel Laureate J.M. Coetzee talks about his time in Austin and the social and political background of his career as a writer in South Africa in the 1970s. Coetzee, who earned a doctor’s degree in 1969 from The University of Texas at Austin, is an acclaimed novelist, academic and literary critic.
The May 5 talk was part of the Graduate School‘s 1910 Society Lecture Series.
J.M. Coetzee photo by Bert Nienhuis.
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Great talk from a great writer. Please keep making these available!
[...] The Censors II Jump to Comments I’ve been indirectly alerted to an error I had posted here by a few commenters on BOOK Southern Africa. As I wrote that post, I couldn’t remember exactly who had introduced Coetzee to the censors had kept on him, and assumed that it was Peter McDonald, author of The Literature Police. It wasn’t. Instead, it was Professor Hermann Wittenberg. A few folks brought that to my attention in an article on Gordimer and Coetzee on censorship available here. That they caught me wrong is great news, because it means the video of Coetzee’s speech is now available online here. [...]
Could you please indicate the exact date of the speech?
How can I get the entire talk to play? I just get about 30 seconds of it. Thanks
He does not say, nor does he seem to imply, that one of the reasons that the censors found his books to be safe was that they were more or less in accessible intellectually to the underclass majority. It is all too fitting that their racist ideology and consequent underestimation of the underclass majority led, in no small part, to their undoing.