Essa pesquisa investiga as causas do não banimento dos romances In the Heart of the Country, Waiting for the Barbarians e Life & Times of Michael K, do escritor sul-africano JM Coetzee, escritos e publicados durante o apartheid, período em que a censura atuava com severidade sobre os discursos da nação, incluindo o literário. A hipótese que norteou o trabalho questionava se as obras mencionadas apresentariam sinais de autocensura por parte do autor. A análise textual dos romances, porém, na intersecção com o momento histórico, revelava ao longo do trabalho que havia outros fatores influenciando a decisão dos censores, conforme demonstramos nesta pesquisa. Para chegarmos às nossas conclusões, analisamos as cartas trocadas entre o autor e suas editoras, os relatórios oficiais deixados pelos censores e os romances a partir da visão dos censores. A intersecção dessas fontes apontou para o fato de que não somente o autor praticou consciente ou inconscientemente algum tipo de autocensura, mas também os editores e censores, provocando uma reflexão mais ampla sobre o contexto da censura na África do Sul. / This research investigates the causes of the non-banishement of the novels In the Heart of the Country, Waiting for the Barbarians, and Life & Times of Michael K, by JM Coetzee, written and published during the times of apartheid, when censorship acted severely on the national narratives, including the literary one. The hypothesis guiding this work questioned whether the above mentioned novels would present signs of selfcensorship practiced by the author. However, as we proceed with our investigation, the textual analysis of the novels in intersection with their moment in history revealed that there were other factors influencing the censors decisions, as we show in this work. To achieve our conclusions, we have analised letters enchanged between the author and his editors, the official reports left by the censors, and the novels themselves, all from the censors point of view. The intersection with these sources pointed to the fact that not only did the author practice consciously or unconsciously some kind of censorship, but so did the censors who analised his books and his editors, provoking a broader reflection on the context of South African censorship.

Essa pesquisa investiga as causas do não banimento dos romances In the Heart of the Country, Waiting for the Barbarians e Life & Times of Michael K, do escritor sul-africano JM Coetzee, escritos e publicados durante o apartheid, período em que a censura atuava com severidade sobre os discursos da nação, incluindo o literário. A hipótese que norteou o trabalho questionava se as obras mencionadas apresentariam sinais de autocensura por parte do autor. A análise textual dos romances, porém, na intersecção com o momento histórico, revelava ao longo do trabalho que havia outros fatores influenciando a decisão dos censores, conforme demonstramos nesta pesquisa. Para chegarmos às nossas conclusões, analisamos as cartas trocadas entre o autor e suas editoras, os relatórios oficiais deixados pelos censores e os romances a partir da visão dos censores. A intersecção dessas fontes apontou para o fato de que não somente o autor praticou consciente ou inconscientemente algum tipo de autocensura, mas também os editores e censores, provocando uma reflexão mais ampla sobre o contexto da censura na África do Sul. / This research investigates the causes of the non-banishement of the novels In the Heart of the Country, Waiting for the Barbarians, and Life & Times of Michael K, by JM Coetzee, written and published during the times of apartheid, when censorship acted severely on the national narratives, including the literary one. The hypothesis guiding this work questioned whether the above mentioned novels would present signs of selfcensorship practiced by the author. However, as we proceed with our investigation, the textual analysis of the novels in intersection with their moment in history revealed that there were other factors influencing the censors decisions, as we show in this work. To achieve our conclusions, we have analised letters enchanged between the author and his editors, the official reports left by the censors, and the novels themselves, all from the censors point of view. The intersection with these sources pointed to the fact that not only did the author practice consciously or unconsciously some kind of censorship, but so did the censors who analised his books and his editors, provoking a broader reflection on the context of South African censorship.

This thesis articulates the resonances between J.M. Coetzee's lifelong engagement with mathematics and his practice as a novelist, critic, and poet. Though the critical discourse surrounding Coetzee's literary work continues to flourish, and though the basic details of his background in mathematics are now widely acknowledged, his inheritance from that background has not yet been the subject of a comprehensive and mathematically- literate account. In providing such an account, I propose that these two strands of his intellectual trajectory not only developed in parallel, but together engendered several of the characteristic qualities of his finest work. The structure of the thesis is essentially thematic, but is also broadly chronological. Chapter 1 focuses on Coetzee's poetry, charting the increasing involvement of mathematical concepts and methods in his practice and poetics between 1958 and 1979. Chapter 2 situates his master's thesis alongside archival materials from the early stages of his academic career, and thus traces the development of his philosophical interest in the migration of quantificatory metaphors into other conceptual domains. Concentrating on his doctoral thesis and a series of contemporaneous reviews, essays, and lecture notes, Chapter 3 details the calculated ambivalence with which he therein articulates, adopts, and challenges various statistical methods designed to disclose objective truth. Chapter 4 explores the thematisation of several mathematical concepts in Dusklands and In the Heart of the Country. Chapter Five considers Waiting for the Barbarians and Foe in the context provided by Coetzee's interest in the attempts of Isaac Newton to bridge the gap between natural language and the supposedly transparent language of mathematics. Finally, Chapter 6 locates in Elizabeth Costello and Diary of a Bad Year a cognitive approach to the use of mathematical concepts in ethics, politics, and aesthetics, and, by analogy, a central aspect of the challenge Coetzee's late fiction poses to the contemporary literary landscape.