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Derek Attridge

Derek Attridge is the author and editor of numerous works, including J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading: Literature in the Event (Chicago, 2005) and Writing South Africa: Literature, Apartheid, and Democracy, 1970–1995 (Cambridge, 1998).

Author

A Writer’s Life: J. M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello

Fall 2004 | Criticism

No preliminary explanation, no introduction to prepare us for this clearly fictional statement, couched in the third-person present tense familiar from The Master of Petersburg (his most recent novel at the time), and for those of us who thought this might be the familiar lecturer's strategy of beginning with a quotation from another author, no break in the fictional tissue from henceforward to the end of the presentation.