In His Essay, “Die Skrywer En Die Teorie” (“The Writer and Theory”), Coetzee makes a claim that, by his own admission, surely scandalized his South African literary audience when he first presented this paper at the SAVAL conference in Bloemfontein in 1980: “I must confess,” says Coetzee,

In the course of his paper, Coetzee identifies two attitudes to literary criticism that he sets himself against, and this provides the inspiration for the double entendre in the title of my chapter: the following discussion is about Coetzee’s own critical essays, but it also addresses Coetzee’s critique of assumptions about the relation between fiction and critical writing. To date, Coetzee’s novels have attracted far more scholarly attention than his critical essays have — and when his essays and interviews are cited, this is typically done within the context of a discussion primarily concerned with the fiction. However, Coetzee has produced no fewer than five volumes of nonfiction (White Writing, 1988; Doubling the Point, 1992; Giving Offense, 1996; Stranger Shores, 2001; Inner Workings, 2007) and has published several other essays, interviews, and literary reviews besides. Coetzee’s master’s thesis on Ford Madox Ford (1963), which he wrote while working as a mathemetician and computer programmer in England, and his doctoral dissertation on Samuel Beckett (1969) each play a significant and distinctive role in Coetzee’s own development as a writer. At the time of writing his master’s and his doctorate, Coetzee found himself at a busy intersection of literary studies and linguistics, computational logic, and mathematics (Coetzee holds postgraduate degrees in literature and linguistics, and also in mathematics). In his MA thesis, Coetzee writes of Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier that it is “probably the finest example of literary pure mathematics in English” (FMF, x), and in his doctorate on Beckett, he developed and experimented with a statistical method of analyzing literary style.