Coetzee is one of the most studied contemporary authors, widely taught on undergraduate and postgraduate courses, and his works have been a focus of intense debate for postcolonial critics. This is partly due to the burning importance of the late-colonial situation in South Africa until the final demise of apartheid in 1994, and the instructive position of a white South African writer in relation to that context. But it has also to do with the politically oblique nature of Coetzee's expression, which has tended to divide critics, and to frustrate those looking for a more overtly interventionist form of writing. Increasingly, however, critics have responded favourably to the subtle textual nuances of Coetzee's work. One prominent poststructuralist critic, sensitive to the political potential in Coetzee's literary preoccupations, is Gayatri Spivak, who, writing on Foe, finds that novel's metafictional orientation serves to supplement rather than oppose more directly interventionist writing on South Africa. (‘Theory in the Margin: Coetzee's Foe Reading Defoe's Crusoe/Roxana’, p. 175.) Increasingly, Coetzee's work has provoked elegant and sophisticated work on the theoretical allusiveness of the novels.

The first book devoted to Coetzee was Teresa Dovey's The Novels of J. M. Coetzee: Lacanian Allegories (1988). In its application of Lacan, this book was important as the first attempt to read Coetzee through the sophisticated lens of poststructuralist theory; Dovey also established an idea that has become a staple point of debate in Coetzee studies: that the novels can be read as self-referential allegories in which the use of discourse is held up for examination.