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This essay addresses some of the relations that can be traced between, on the one hand, J. M. Coetzee and Jorge Luis Borges and, on the other, the concept of the Global South and Coetzee’s recent approach to Latin America. The development of his ideas about the notion of the South or “real South,” as opposed to the “mythic South,” is discussed and illustrated through a brief analysis of Borges’s tale “El Sur” [“The South”] and Coetzee’s novel Disgrace. These two texts help us in focusing Coetzee’s rejection of the so-called “Northern Gaze,” a Westernised world-view dominated by the English language, and his preference for Spanish as the language for the initial publication of his latest books. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

My aim in this essay is to explore the complementarities that obtain between Nietzsche's account (or teaching) of the "death of God" and J. M. Coetzee's characterization of David Lurie in his 1999 novel Disgrace. I am particularly concerned to investigate the responses of Nietzsche's Madman and Coetzee's protagonist to their respective insights into (or experiences of) the "death of God." Both respondents, I offer, may be seen and understood to create public spectacles in which they acquire (what they take to be) permanent, meaning-conferring identities that are meant, if not destined, to withstand the dislocations and calamities to come. In both cases, moreover, the point of the spectacle is to secure the conditions under which its architect may escape any responsibility for navigating the uncertainties that are bound to arise in the aftermath of the "death of God." Whereas Nietzsche is primarily concerned to anticipate (and diagnose) the distress that leads to the creation of responsibility-deferring spectacles, Coetzee provides an instructive treatment of life after the death of God, as David Lurie is compelled to confront the emerging post-theistic order he had hoped to avoid. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the politics of fetishism in J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace. It contends that the characters in Coetzee’s novel appear to consciously suspend the danger that is often associated with strangers. They willingly interact with those in their neighborhoods and consciously suppress the warnings of mishaps or misfortune that such strange encounters may entail. This study is a textual analysis of the selected text to examine all the encounters, specifically those between Lucy and the natives, as well as those of Bev Shaw with David Lurie. In the post-colonial period, such abnormal behavior notably reveals a distinct feature of fetishism among the colonizer and the colonized, as it does in Coetzee’s characters. In order to achieve this objective, Coetzee’s novel is the primary text, while Sara Ahmed’s concepts of “Stranger Fetishism” and “Encounters” serve as a theoretical framework for this investigation. The objective of this research is to analyze the ambiguities of characters in the novel, such as Lucy’s passive response to her rape and Bev’s ironic behavior with David. Eventually, the discussion leads to the unfolding of their personal intents, which are deliberately kept undercover to satisfy their personal interests. This research intervenes in the current scholarship on postcolonial studies by bringing fresh reading perspectives on Coetzee’s text. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I reconsider J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace, often interpreted in the context of South Africa's transition to post-apartheid life and with an eye to the nation's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, by instead reading it in light of the international twenty-first century #MeToo movement. I contend that, in retrospect, Disgrace both demonstrates affinities with #MeToo and proleptically envisions, from the postcolonial periphery, the contours of the movement decades before its forceful emergence as a watershed moment in the West. Disgrace tells a story echoed in many #MeToo accounts, depicting the public exposure and fall from grace of a privileged white man following his sexual exploitation of a non-white student. My interests lie not in the matter of David Lurie's potential redemption; rather, I explore Coetzee's exposure of the persistence of institutionalised gendered and racial privileges through moments of historical transformation. I argue that Disgrace's highlighting of its own unnarrated perspectives anticipates the forceful challenge to a lingering white heterosexual hegemony that characterises #MeToo, while at the same time exposing the perpetual marginalisation of non-white and non-Western traumas in discourses of transitional justice in South Africa and globally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The present paper is an attempt to investigate and throw some light on J. M. Coetzee's celebrated novel Disgrace (1999) in South Africa's postapartheid in order to indicate the ramifications in the aftermath of apartheid in which with the subversion of the white authority, and the change in power structures of the society, the once dominant ideology presupposing the white superiority over the black fades away. Through identity crisis, mimicry and violence, the white hegemony shatters and a new power structure comes into being. Hence, David Lurie, the protagonist along with his daughter Lucy are taken as representatives of the whites that suffer both physically and psychologically and go through an identity crisis which leads them to a kind of awareness regarding their current situation in the postapartheid period. Having endured and suffered some pains that are going to be presented in the subsequent sections of the current study, David and Lucy draw a conclusion that there is apparently no way but co-existence and compromise between the two races. Apartheid, indeed, leaves a wound for both the black and the white through conflicts and collisions between them. Therefore, Lucy can be regarded as the symbol of redemption and reconciliation between the two races. In what follows, the word apartheid will be first defined and elaborated on, then applied to Coetzee's selected novel in order to examine and demonstrate its overarching effects on both the white and the black. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The topical subject of vegetarianism and non-violence towards animals is gaining currency in literary circles, as is attested by the award of the Man Booker International Prize to Han Kang's The Vegetarian in 2016. There has been a rash of talks and conferences which explore the idea of veganism/vegetarianism and its representation in works of art. While the ethical implications of being a vegetarian have been a constant theme in discussions all over the world, the present essay seeks to uncover the spiritual and aesthetic significations attached to vegetarianism. It aims at reading selected works by J. M. Coetzee as an aestheticised/fictionalised discourse on ahimsa (non-violence) from a Gandhian spiritual perspective. It is important to remember that Gandhi's vision of spirituality is not necessarily contingent on religious belief. One may or may not follow a particular faith yet be spiritual in nature. This is because spirituality, in the Gandhian sense, primarily manifests itself in just or ethical action. I will critically examine how Coetzee in Disgrace (1999) and The Lives of Animals (1999) represents the treatment of animals by humans, suggesting that these works be read as aestheticized manifestations of a Gandhian vision of spirituality. Now that we know that these books were being written at the same time (Attwell 216), it would be interesting to explore how Coetzee's literary imagination was being shaped by Gandhian insights. The paper also describes how Gandhi conceptualised and practised his own version of ahimsa. Gandhi's choice to be a vegetarian was not made automatically or unquestioningly. The paper seeks to demonstrate that just as Coetzee highlights the ambivalence of truth in his writings, Gandhi's life is replete with paradoxical choices, which make his ideas at once theoretically debatable and practically spiritual. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rape is a recurrent motive in J. M. Coetzee's fiction, it being present in novels such as Disgrace (1999), Diary of a bad year (2007) and Elizabeth Costello (2003). This work's objective is to analyze each representation of rape in those novels to discuss the views on violence and disgrace presented. I also relate them to Coetzee's own views such as his vison of what - despite his denial of censorship - might better remain unsaid. In Disgrace, David Lurie sees himself as falling into disgrace after he is charged by the student with whom he had an abrupt affair. Later, his daughter, Lucy, is brutally raped and chooses to keep it as a private affair. She ends up questioning male sexuality as a whole. In Diary of a bad year, Anya believes dishonor to fall over those who raped her, and not over her. However, Señor C disagrees, seeing dishonor as miasma. Finally, in Elizabeth Costello, the protagonist remembers an experience with evil she passed through with a man. She then defends that some things should not be read or written and discusses the risk that writers go through by exploring darker areas of human experience, a view which echoes Coetzee's own. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay takes up Derrida's discussion in 'Force and Signification' of reading and writing as a 'strange labour of conversion and adventure in which grace can only be absent [ l'absente]'. It focuses on the ideas of work, the oeuvre, labour and travail in Derrida and Cixous, and in J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace. And it pursues the thinking of a work other than that fetishized by conservative ideologues, and links this to the work of fiction, and of the novel. While it eschews any theological debate about the relationship between grace and works, some space is left open here for the advent of grace, the absent one. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines different situations and events in J.M. Coetzee's novel Disgrace (1999) that turn the white male protagonist and his daughter into victims of post-apartheid South African violence at the hands of black men. From initial exploiters, the whites become the exploited and have to accept that they are part of a larger social and political struggle to (re)construct a country that is still deeply confronted with racial discrimination and a high crime rate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper looks at the intersection between human and animal bodies in J. M. Coetzee's post-apartheid novel Disgrace (1999). My argument is that Coetzee employs postmodern notions about the overlap between human and non-human bodies and their proximity in his fiction. Although Coetzee problematizes our conception of the body in most of his other works, it is in Disgrace that we have a unique combination of human and animal bodies and a juxtaposition of each body against the other. Coetzee, I contend, writes within the rubrics of postmodern posthumanism whereby his works interrogate questions of life, death, embodiment, otherness, and the body. While it is characteristic of postmodernism to break down distinctions and to argue the irrelevance of borders, Coetzee applies this logic to his treatment of humans and animals and toward significant ethical and political ends. Through multiple encounters with animals, David Lurie in Disgrace is forced to reexamine the boundaries between animal and human life and, thus, to react differently to suffering and other forms of life around him. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Disgrace can be read as a deliberation on rape in all its complexity, articulating and commenting upon many of the positions typical of the radical feminism of the seventies. Some feminists classify prostitution as a form of rape. Prostitution is the ideal form of sex for the main character, David, because it allows him to fantasize that a woman mirrors his wishes. The border between rape and consensual sex is shown to be problematic in the relationship between David and his young student, Melanie. Although some readers find that Melanie was willingly seduced, others consider that she was raped. The charge of sexual harassment is therefore unsatisfactory for both sides and, since David refuses to read the charges brought against him, he effectively silences his accuser. When his daughter, Lucy, equates heterosexual sex with killing and hating women, one can read it as evoking the radical feminist idea that men as a class subordinate women as a class through the threat of rape. Lucy's political lesbianism is a logical response to such misogyny. After being rape, Lucy accepts a subordinate position and this proves the power of rape in controlling women. Like one of the Sabine women, Lucy seems willing to sacrifice herself for peace between black and white in South Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study centers around two kinds of people in J. M. Coetzee's novel Disgrace: the whites and the blacks. The white protagonist David Lurie, with his strong colonialist ideology, projects his dominance over the women characters and his racial superiority over the blacks. But now to his disgrace, he is mimicked by the blacks, either in the way of rape or by means of the use of the English language and farming skills. But what Coetzee mainly wants to show is not that the whites are being revenged for their past deeds and they could do nothing but wait for punishment. Actually, he is pointing out the way out of disgrace for the whites. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Perhaps no other novel has received as much attention from moral philosophers as South African writer J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace. The novel is ethically compelling and yet no moral theory explains its force. Despite clear Kantian moments, neither rationalism nor self-respect can account for the strange ethical task that the protagonist sets for himself. Calling himself the dog man, like the ancient Cynics, this shamelessly cynical protagonist takes his cues for ethics not from humans but from animals. He does not however claim much in the way of empathy or understanding of animals, and his own odd motives remain a puzzle throughout the stages of his ethical transformation. Many scholars approach Coetzee's text through an ethics of alterity, and even argue that Disgrace is exemplary in this regard. Kristeva's rendition of alterity ethics brings us close to the novel's vision, and yet the novel points towards a more primordial basis for ethics in the search for meaning through the human encounter with other animal species. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This chapter aims to complicate the emerging picture of art as a possible source of emotional knowledge creation by investigating the complex relationship between ethics and aesthetics. J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace, through a sustained engagement with the aesthetic ideology of the Romantic tradition, challenges the moral authority of literary inheritance, forcing the reader to confront the uncomfortable possibility that, rather than enlightening us, aesthetic engagement might instead provide a justifying framework for unethical attitudes and behaviour. I trace the cognitive path traversed by the novel's central character, the intellectual David Lurie, as he is forced by a series of extreme personal experiences to reconsider the relationship of art to wider social structures. Initially an admirer of Romantic art, Lurie comes to recognize that its conceptual schema conceals a worldview that is ethically questionable. Paradoxically, however, the power of art is retained when Lurie uses it to uncover and express his newfound knowledge of the world and the self. I argue that Lurie's story is a complex and ambiguous development from aesthetic 'not-knowing' and even ignorance towards a deeper emotional involvement with the surrounding world, one in which sympathy, emotion, and the imagination are viewed as valuable components of knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, the South African plaasroman or pastoral novel depicted white physical labor in the countryside and elided black labor, which functioned to legitimize Afrikaner ownership of African land. As J. M. Coetzee demonstrates in White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa (1988), commonplace in the plaasroman is the figure of the Jew, who attempts to swindle the farm from its rightful, white owner. Coetzee's novel Disgrace (1999) seeks to destabilize the ideological underpinnings of the pastoral novel by means of inverting its discursive elements. Therefore, in his anti-pastoral novel Disgrace, Coetzee replaces the plaasroman's white male patriarch with that genre's metaphor of otherness, the Jew. The Jew's ambivalent whiteness allows for such a transposition, whereas the protagonist's ''Jewish'' body results in his weakness and inability to work the land, which subverts the plaasroman's mythic inscription of the countryside as property of the white peasantry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An essay is presented which examines the choice of landscape concerning the literary-biographical sub-plot of romantic scholar protagonist in the South African novel of J. M. Coetzee titled "Disgrace." It discusses how the novel relates on the colonial history of British settlement and how the story of Byron's exile in Italy relate to the Eastern Cape. It emphasizes that the novel highlights a radical romanticism which challenges the British romantic tradition.

One year after the massive, five-volume Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa Report appeared in 1998, we indisputably witness in Coetzee's Disgrace , by way of the account of professor David Lurie's downfall, the upheaval of a country in transition. The representation of this upheaval, however, drew considerable attention nationally and internationally and sparked a still ongoing debate on what Coetzee was trying to say about the life and times of post-apartheid South Africa. In this essay it is argued that an interpretation that allows itself to be guided too much by an allegorical meaning of Disgrace 's mirror plot and that is too quick to accept the referentiality of a post-apartheid South Africa screaming for future images, ignores important if not essential plot lines and intertextual echoes. The powers of imagination, as masterfully deployed by J. M. Coetzee, make the role of literature in the production of cultural memory both monumentalising and ambiguous. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]