JM Coetzee and the ethics of reading:

One of Derek Attridge's principal concerns in J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading is the relationship that is established with alterity in the writing and reading of literary works. As is evident from the fact that some of the chapters in the book date back more than a decade, this is an abiding concern. Indeed, The Singularity of Literature, which also appeared in 2004, theorizes this relationship at great length. In it, Attridge describes the literary text as the emanation of an act of creation, that is, that mysterious experience in which the writer, who is located in culture's familiar modes of understanding, encounters something strange (in that it does not yet exist within the horizon that culture provides for thinking and feeling) and is required to resist the mind's tendency to reduce novelty by understanding it in terms of the familiar