UTOPIA AND DYSTOPIA: ‘A BRAVE NEW WORLD’ AND THE CASE OF JM COETZEE
UTOPIA AND DYSTOPIA: ‘A BRAVE NEW WORLD’ AND THE CASE OF JM COETZEE

Summary/Abstract: In this paper, I make a case for the need to re-evaluate JM Coetzee’s novel, The Master of Petersburg, in the global context of today, a context of ever increasing authoritarian populisms and erratic acts of violence. Published in 1994, the novel by the Nobel Laureate is set in Russia of the 1860s, against a backdrop of anarchist opposition to the Tsarist state. Critics have been puzzled by the writer’s apparently ‘escapist’ choice of fictional setting at a time when his own country was in a turbulent transition from one dispensation to another. Central to my analysis is the danger of living in radicalised political times, while treading a precarious path between the utopia of revolutionary fervour and unpredictable dystopian unfoldings.

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