Ithaca College

 Chris Holmes will give a talk on the writer J.M. Coetzee

 This Thursday, Chair of English, Chris Holmes, will give a talk at the University of Pennsylvania titled: "Ugly Ducklings: J.M. Coetzee's Decoys." Drawn from his book project, the talk uses the theory of the comic decoy to understand Coetzee's refusal to allow his work to speak directly to the political urgencies of the moment. In order to be "in on the joke", he argues, one must be willing to forgo the supposed "real" objective of reading--decoding a political ideology--in favor of the decoy, literary form's space for thinking without resolution.