Projekt
Automatic Writing, Automatic Reading: Programming and Labor in Two Novels by J. M. Coetzee
Abstract: In apartheid South Africa in the 1960s, official discourse about automation and computerization was racially inflected because apartheid racialized the division of labor. In the same era, writers in different countries programmed computers to generate poetry and prose. One of those writers was J. M. Coetzee.…
Abstract: In apartheid South Africa in the 1960s, official discourse about automation and computerization was racially inflected because apartheid racialized the division of labor. In the same era, writers in different countries programmed computers to generate poetry and prose. One of those writers was J. M. Coetzee. Coetzee’s early fiction bears the trace of his even earlier experiments in computer poetry more than hitherto recognized, and engages critically with the peculiar inflection, in its moment, of apartheid discourse on labor.