ABSTRACT
J. M. Coetzee urging to students to the call of teaching is pressing and compelling. His words exhibit generosity in the most hopeful of academic lectures. Leaning back onto the etymological meaning of pedagogy as an adult guide to the child’s formation, pedagogy is figured in the narrative thrust of Coetzee’s novels. Coetzee characterizes immeasurable qualities of memory, desire, silence, care, language, violence, relation, as key to the internal operations of pedagogy. Coetzee’s novel return of pedagogy to education is as it arises in a relation of teaching and learning between self and other. The bildungsroman of self-learning in Coetzee’s novels is of self-other conflict. Coetzee’s pedagogical experiment with the novel as witness to conflicted self-formation provides the reader with unprecedented access to the other’s fraught interior recesses of learning. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.
