Winner of the Nobel Prize and the Booker Prize (twice), J.M Coetzee is regarded as one of the foremost writers of our times. His works, which range from the allegorical to the realist, from the meta-fictional to the modernist, engage with both the ways we think about literature and literary studies and the historical conditions of the various forms of imperialism. His novels negotiate the uneasy generic boundaries between modernism, postmodernism and postcolonialism. Through close readings of a wide array of his novels, and by being properly attentive to the historical backgrounds and theoretical concerns of Coetzee’s texts, the course will explore the development of his writing from the 1970s to the present day.