Narratives of Disability and Illness in the Fiction of J. M. Coetzee

This study explores the representations of disability and illness in the novels of J.M. Coetzee, offering a comprehensive analysis of both his early and late works. It examines the evolution of Coetzee's engagement with non-normative embodiment, revealing how his nuanced depictions of disability critique the ableist assumptions underlying political violence and biomedical discourses of postmodernity. By addressing a wide array of concepts—such as ocularnormativism, mute speech, eco-disability, Crip-Goth, dismodernism, autogerontography, and bibliotherapy—the book proposes that Coetzee’s “narrative ethics of disability” provides a sustained meditation on the cultural denigration of disabled experience. Despite extensive scholarly attention to Coetzee, his engagement with disability has been underexplored, a gap this book seeks to fill. Through literary and archival research, including unpublished drafts and materials from the Harry Ransom Center, the book offers a fresh perspective on Coetzee’s work, analysing sensory, physical, and intellectual disabilities in his novels. Using interdisciplinary methods from literary and cultural theory, the study rereads Coetzee’s novels through the lens of Disability Studies. It also responds to contemporary debates on disability metaphors, neoliberal ableism, sensory normativism, and the intersection of disability with ecocriticism and care ethics. By focusing solely on Coetzee’s novels, the book traces the chronological development of his disability representations, situating them within shifting political and cultural contexts. This work provides an in-depth, systematic analysis of Coetzee’s critique of ableism and its broader implications for disability representation in literature.