The Precarious Author, Diary of a Bad Year, Slow Man

Abstract: The idea of the author and the "authority" on which works of fiction might be based has long been precarious, as evinced by the first modern novel, Don Quixote , when it challenged such authority. This precarity in turn is transferred to the very idea of meaning itself, and the possibility of somehow approaching the "truth." Two of Coetzee's later novels, Diary of a Bad Year and Slow Man shed light on the complex nature of authorial intention. Coetzee's doctoral dissertation and his engagement with New Critical, structuralist, and post-structuralist theory serve to frame the question. Like much of Coetzee's fiction, these works directly engage with the figure of the writer and provoke us to think about the ethical and epistemological implications of literary authority.