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J.M. Coetzee is one of the most celebrated and studied novelists of the twenty first century. He was born on February 9 of 1940, to an attorney father and a school teacher mother. The South African environment in which Coetzee was raised profoundly shaped his works. He was the first writer who won the Booker Prize twice for his novels namely Life& Times of Michael K (1983) and Disgrace (1999). He was awarded Nobel Prize for literature in 2003. He writes in the third person narrative and maintains a characteristic sense of distance even in the process of writing about his own life. Metaphor is a figure of speech in which a word or phrase denoting one kind of objects or idea that is used in the place of another to suggest a comparison between the two. Disgrace is the most celebrated novel written by J.M Coetzee. In Disgrace, he has used many animal metaphors to express his interest on Non-Human beings. His metaphors are predatory in nature in this novel. By using animal metaphors, J.M. Coetzee wants to compare the sufferings of animals to that of Human beings and to persuade the readers to give equal moral considerations for the life of Non-Human beings. [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]

So far, many articles have been published worldwide on J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace from different angles to delimit and dig out the deep meanings hidden in the novel. Undeniably, those articles are reasonable in their own terms, but meanwhile when coming together they appear a little bit chaotic. What all of them have in common is the setting of certain boundaries. This paper adopts a Daoist perspective and focuses on Daoist ideas, which are beyond any man-made boundary, in Lurie's sexual life, attitudes and actions towards animals and thoughts on literary creation. No matter whether on the levels of content, idea or narration, the novel Disgrace reveals that all the disgraces result from the setting of boundaries, and the ideal of living in this world is to live beyond all the set boundaries, in tune with the natural Dao. [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]

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]