J. M. Coetzee - Academic and Literary Career

Academic and Literary Career

Coetzee relocated to the United Kingdom in 1962, where he worked as a computer programmer, staying until 1965. He worked for IBM in London. In 1963, while working in the UK, he was awarded a Master of Arts degree from the University of Cape Town for a dissertation on the novels of Ford Madox Ford. His experiences in England were later recounted in Youth (2002), his second volume of fictionalized memoirs.

Coetzee went to the University of Texas at Austin, in the United States, on the Fulbright Program in 1965. He received a PhD in linguistics there in 1969. His PhD thesis was on computer stylistic analysis of the works of Samuel Beckett. In 1968, he began teaching English literature at the State University of New York at Buffalo where he stayed until 1971. It was at Buffalo that he started his first novel, Dusklands. In 1971, Coetzee sought permanent residence in the United States, but it was denied due to his involvement in anti-Vietnam-War protests. In March 1970, Coetzee had been one of 45 faculty members who occupied the university's Hayes Hall and were subsequently arrested for criminal trespass. He then returned to South Africa to teach English literature at the University of Cape Town. He was promoted to Professor of General Literature in 1983 and was Distinguished Professor of Literature between 1999 and 2001. Upon retiring in 2002, Coetzee relocated to Adelaide, Australia, where he was made an honorary research fellow at the English Department of the University of Adelaide, where his partner, Dorothy Driver, is a fellow academic. He served as professor on the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago until 2003. In addition to his novels, he has published critical works and translations from Dutch and Afrikaans.

In June 2011, he gave a reading from his new book at the University of York, UK, though no title or release date was made available. Its title has since been revealed as The Childhood of Jesus, due for release March 2013, and concerning the early life of Jesus, particularly his struggles to free himself from the iron-fisted discipline of his long-suffering parents, get the girl, earn a decent wage, and find his place in an unforgiving world.