Coetzee and modernism

Here's a proposal for an essay I have been asked to write. It's a bit vague at the moment, but I hope to use this space to firm it out in the year I have to submit it. I guess it's an attempt to align my current work on modernist literary criticism and on Blanchot to the demands of postcolonialism.

Coetzee and the problem of origination.

At the beginning of modernist theorization of literature, T.S. Eliot found the origins of the individual literary text simultaneously in tradition and in experience, even though the latter had been degraded under enlightened modernity. In “The origin of the work of art,” Martin Heidegger proclaimed that the work’s origin was the work itself, albeit an origin that opened a space for the appearance of Being.  Writing after the Second World War, Maurice Blanchot also thought of the origin as the work itself, but now itself configured as an experience which affirms Being’s absence, and indeed exists in the silence the work and its “essential experience” imposes on the endless flow of meanings.
Between them, these formulations provide not just a path into (conservative) European modernism but also a way into Coetzee’s relation to that modernism. His writing endlessly circulate around the problem of their own origin as posed in terms that are at once experiential and ontological and literary. It is no exaggeration to say that Coetzee’s importance as a writer depends largely on his sense of his barred access to a modernist origin for his writing.
This essay will offer a historicist account of Coetzee’s relation to modernism from this perspective. In analyzing his treatment of his work’s origins, it will draw attention both to his position as a colonial writer, as a practicing literary critic and theorist, and to the particular structuration of the late 20th century global literary field for which he writes.