The Censors II

I’ve been indirectly alerted to an error I had posted here by a few commenters on BOOK Southern Africa.  As I wrote that post, I couldn’t remember exactly who had introduced Coetzee to the censors had kept on him, and assumed that it was Peter McDonald, author of The Literature Police. It wasn’t. Instead, it was Professor Hermann Wittenberg. A few folks brought that to my attention in an article on Gordimer and Coetzee on censorship available here.  That they caught me wrong is great news, because it means the video of Coetzee’s speech is now available online here.

The Censors

If ancient Sparta had ever produced an intellectual, which is not to suggest they haven’t, I’d place good money that such an intellectual would have walked, talked, and written a good bit like the famed South African novelist J.M. Coetzee.