Refusing Self-Containment: Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year

Abstract

Diary of a Bad Year (2007), by J. M. Coetzee, represents the first in a series of studies in the following chapters that take fictional narratives as their focus: novels, stories, plays, and films. In these cases both form and content are made up of words, though of course theater and film contain visual images as well. In all cases the focus will be on the form, but always with the awareness that it is impossible to separate form entirely from content, since they are part of the same linguistic fold. Furthermore, the verbal content inevitably affords insight into the dissolution or permeability of the structural elements.