A Few Words About This Blog

Back in 2007, when I was a doctoral student preparing to write his dissertation on J. M. Coetzee, I decided to blog my way through the process. Ultimately, the blog project turned out to be a wonderful way for me to hold myself accountable. Somewhat surprisingly (at least to me), the blog attracted a few regular readers. At first, that readership consisted exclusively of a few supportive friends who visited the website to cheer me on. As time passed, however, a handful of J. M. Coetzee scholars began following my progress and at least one of them included a reference to the blog in a monograph about Coetzee. After I had completed and successfully defended my dissertation, I wrapped up the blog project and moved on to focus on my career as an English professor.

Shortly after I completed the blog project, Blogger ceased allowing users to post their blogs on domains that were not hosted by Google, which meant that I would no longer be able to continue writing the blog even if I had wanted to, so I published one final post and contented myself with the knowledge that future Coetzee scholars would be able to access what I had written. Unfortunately, since I had customized the blog's template and would not be able to change it once Blogger's off-site publishing option shut down, the passage of time resulted in quite a bit of link rot, broken images, and other messy details that combined to make for a less-than-ideal reading experience.

It wasn't until I was forced to leave my previous webhost earlier this year, which resulted in my ultimate decision to move the entire website over to Blogger for ease of use, that I was able to revisit the dissertation blog and update the layout for a more modern (and mobile-friendly) feel. While the process of modernizing the blog went smoothly enough, it was not without its bumps. Most notably, I was unable to publish the blog as a subfolder on www.sobriquetmagazine as I had previously done and was forced to create a new subdomain (coetzee.sobriquetmagazine.com) instead. As a result, the Coetzee dissertation blog appears to have virtually disappeared from certain search engines. This post, then, is partially an attempt to remind them that the blog exists. Of course, it is also a way for me to look back on an important part of my life, but that's really just a nice bonus.

At any rate, the posts you encounter here include a range of material. Some of the more useful posts, when taken together, serve as a detailed annotated bibliography of Coetzee scholarship. Elsewhere, I lament the sheer monotony of the boring, yet necessary, daily tasks I needed to take care of in order to write a book-length manuscript. It is my hope that some Coetzee scholars and perhaps a handful of doctoral students will find some useful information or even inspiration here.