J. M. Coetzee
Literatures of the South

In the early 1960s, while in London, Coetzee studied Spanish, and from 2015 to 2018, Coetzee was a director of a biannual seminar series on the Literatures of the South at the Universidad Nacional de San Martín in Argentina. This involved writers and literary figures from Southern Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and South America. The aim of the seminars, one observer remarked, was "to develop comparative perspectives on the literature" and journalism of the three areas, "to establish new intellectual networks, and to build a corpus of translated works from across the South through collaborative publishing ventures". He developed an interest in Argentine literature, and curated a series for the publishing house El Hilo de Ariadna, which includes Tolstoy 's The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Samuel Beckett 's Watt, and Patrick White 's The Solid Mandala. His trilogy of novels The Childhood of Jesus, The Schooldays of Jesus, and The Death of Jesus reflect his preoccupation and evolution of ideas and views on language.

At the same time, he was involved in a research project in Australia, Other Worlds: Forms of World Literature, for which he led a theme on "Everyday Pleasures" that is also focused on the literatures of the South. Coetzee chose to publish The Schooldays of Jesus and The Death of Jesus in Australia, and The Pole in Argentina, before they were published in the U.K. or the U.S. In an interview with El Pais, he said, "the symbolism of publishing in the South before the North is important to me".
language:response_language[German]