summary of playground by jm coetzee in 1500 words
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J.M. Coetzee's first six novels constitute a form of postmodern metafiction that declines the cult of the merely relativist and artful. Coetzee has absorbed the lessons of modern linguistics—the textual turn in structuralism and poststructuralism—yet seriously addresses the ethical and political stresses of living in, and with, a particular historical locale, that of contemporary South Africa. This book is an account of that achievement.
Despite the acclaim that Coetzee has received, both in South Africa and outside it, his fiction has been slow to attract sustained critical attention.[1] This is as true in South Africa as it is elsewhere: in South Africa the sheer power of the novels and—to an ear trained in the comfortable anglophone and positivist conversation of the South African liberal tradition—the strangeness of their idiom seem to have warned away many commentators, certainly those of Coetzee's own generation. A change came in the early to mid-1980s, when a number of essays established a certain consensus on the Left. Although it was by no means watertight, it held that Coetzee was a philosophical idealist whose fiction graphically portrayed the breakup of the dominating, rationalist subject of colonialism but who offered—depending on where the argument was grounded—neither an analysis of the play of historical forces nor a moral anchor in the search for a humane response to colonialism and apartheid.[2]