Jacques Rancière, J. M. Coetzee, and Doing Things Oneself

Jacques Rancière and J. M. Coetzee, exact contemporaries, are both interested the worker’s access to aesthetic experience. In Rancière’s case, this involves looking backward to the fact that nineteenth-century workers were able to squeeze time from their working lives for art and literature. In Coetzee’s case, however, this problem of distributing aesthetic sensibility turns out to be a matter of looking forward in history, and of his own practice. How is he to write in a way that does not unfairly exempt him from work?