There is something uncomfortable talking about the realism of J. M. Coetzee. His Foucauldian understanding of history as a land of "discourse," his interest in the constitutive role of language as a novelist and linguist, as well as his European heritage-all these make us hesitant to call him the loaded term, a "realist." Although the potentials of literary realism have always been Coetzee s main concern, as is well documented in lots of interviews with the author, they have not been explored by critics with the same seriousness as his (post-)modernist textual practice so far-how many academic articles on Coetzee's novels have been reproduced in which the barbarian girl in Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) is the textual evidence of the Spivakean unknowable other, Michael K in Life <b Times of Michael К (1983) is a sort of Derridean trace, and the tongueless Friday in Foe (1986) is a guardian of absolute absence? This article pays attention, instead, to what has been relatively ignored in the canonization of the so-called Coetzee Studies; that is, the political implications of literary form and the issue of literary realism beyond the Western modernist episteme.