Title: On the Othering of Self-Writing in Coetzee’s Summertime

Abstract: As the concluding volume of J. M. Coetzee’s autobiographical trilogy, Summertime further demonstrates the author’s sustained reflection on autobiographical writing. Through the deployment of multiple narrative voices and modes, Coetzee deliberately positions the authorial self as an Other, thereby blurring the boundaries between fictional narrative and biographical fact. In contrast to the previous two volumes of his trilogy, Summertime employs a fragmented narrative structure to dismantle the presumed coherence and sameness of personal identity, while its strategy of narrative othering poses a fundamental challenge to conventional autobiographical discourse. For Coetzee, the othering of self-writing not only extends the possibilities of the autobiographical genre but also reopens the question of truth in literary representation. He suggests that self-writing can no longer reproduce a unified and coherent personal identity; rather, literary truth becomes attainable precisely through an othered mode of self-representation.

Keywords: Summertime, self-writing, othering, literary truth, J. M. Coetzee

Author: Jinmei Zhang, Lecturer, School of Foreign Languages, Xinyang University, Xinyang, Henan, China.

DOI: 10.19967/j.cnki.flc.2025.04.009