The place from when I read: Intertextuality and the postcolonial present. Reading 'Elizabeth Costello' (and J. M. Coetzee)

This particular study does not set forth to recount, reconstruct, recontextualize or, ultimately, reinterpret J. M. Coetzee's contributions to postcolonial---or, specifically, South African---writing. Rather, this study will first qualify and then employ a nuanced form of intertextuality, most specifically indebted to the work of Julia Kristeva, as a paradigmatic model for reading Coetzee's work within established larger postcolonial, national, international and specifically literary contexts. Elizabeth Costello (2003), J. M. Coetzee's most recent work of fiction (perhaps "fiction"), provides an interesting and instructive textual location in which to observe the mechanics of intertextuality, as they function to develop not only an examination of postcoloniality, but also the politics and performative nature of the postcolonial present. Close study of this text from the wide sample of Coetzee's work will trace the intertextuality functioning in the creation of both postcolonial consciousness and subjectivity and, likewise, the position of the postcolonial author.