SOURCE: "An Interview with J. M. Coetzee," in World Literature Today, Vol. 70, No. 1, Winter, 1996, pp. 107-11.

In the following interview, Coetzee discusses his book Giving Offense and his position on key issues in the debate on censorship.

J. M. Coetzee's new book, Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship discusses both writers and theorists from D. H. Lawrence to Geoffrey Cronje. It also covers a variety of concepts from feminist protest against pornography to South African apartheid opposition. Coetzee's stance does not take the binary oppositional Either/Or except in voting against censorship. On the whole, the ethical and philosophical question presented is whether or not one respects the act of taking offense by those whose convictions one does not share.

[World Literature Today:] Your new book has chapters on a wide range of writers—D. H. Lawrence, Desiderius Erasmus, Osip Mandelstam, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Zbigniew Herbert, Andre Brink, Breyten Breytenbach...