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AbstractHistoryArchive Description
After years teaching Romantic poetry at the Technical University of Cape Town, David Lurie, middle-aged and twice divorced, has an impulsive affair with a student. The affair sours; he is denounced and summoned before a committee of inquiry. Willing to admit his guilt, but refusing to yield to pressure to repent publicly, he resigns and retreats to his daughter Lucy's isolated smallholding. For a time, his daughter's influence and the natural rhythms of the farm promise to harmonise his discordant life. But the balance of power in the country is shifting. He and Lucy become victims of a savage and disturbing attack which brings into relief all the faultlines in their relationship.' (Publisher's blurb)
Adaptations
-
form
y
Disgrace
( dir. Steve Jacobs
)
Australia
:
Sherman Films
Whitest Pouring Films
Fortissimo Films
,
2007
Z1410365
2007
single work
film/TV
'Professor David Lurie's life falls apart after he has an impulsive affair with one of his students. Forced to resign from the university he escapes to his daughter's farm. The relationship is tested when they both become victims of a vicious attack.' Source: www.afc.gov.au/ (Sighted 21/07/2007).
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Other Formats
- Large print.
- Sound recording.
Related Works
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y
Disgrace
Oxford
:
Oak Tree Fine Press
,
2006
6173542
2006
extract
novel
"The first thing the midwife noticed about Michael K when she helped him out of his mother into the world was that he had a hare lip. The lip curled like a snail's foot, the left nostril gaped. Obscuring the child for a moment from its mother, she prodded open the tiny bud of a mouth and was thankful to find the palate whole."
So begins the novel Life and Times of Michael K, a frightening vision of a post apocalyptic South Africa, which was the first of J M Coetzee’s novels to win the Booker Prize in 1983. Each numbered book is individually signed by the author and features specially commissioned original artwork by South African artist, Colbert Mashile. The deluxe editions of each volume include an original artist’s print inspired by Life & Times of Michael K .
Works about this Work
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J.M. Coetzee’s Provocative First Book Turns 50 This Year – and His Most Controversial Turns 25
2024
single work
column
— Appears in: The Conversation , 26 January 2024;'J.M. Coetzee, one of the leading novelists of our age, turns 84 this year. Last year, he published The Pole and Other Stories, his 18th book (excluding volumes of criticism, commentary, letters and translations). Its flowering of mature style confirms that this writer remains at the top of his game.'
-
Disgrace
2023
single work
criticism
— Appears in: The Bloomsbury Handbook to J. M. Coetzee 2023; (p. 147-158) -
The Anticipation of #MeToo in J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace
2022
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Journal of Literary Studies , June vol. 38 no. 2 2022;'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 institutionalized 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 characterizes MeToo, while at the same time exposing the perpetual marginalization of non white and non Western traumas in discourses of transitional justice in South Africa and globally.' (Publication abstract)
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y
Rhymes with Hyenas
Canberra
:
Recent Work Press
,
2021
20909627
2021
selected work
poetry
'Imagine if six famous protagonists transcended chronological and geographical barriers to come together through a poetry group in Adelaide. Rhymes with Hyenas is an inventive narrative of emails and poetry that gives a female voice to characters originally written by men. They are Ursula from DH Lawrence’s Women in Love, Caddy from Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, Melanie from Coetzee’s Disgrace, Delores from Nabokov’s Lolita, Katherina from Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew, and Lilith from Hebrew mythology.
'In a poignant ode to literature and Adelaide, these women are whole, complex characters, sometimes up to their breasts in mothering, sometimes homesick for exiled lands. They are lecturers, dog owners, art makers and carers who deal with illness and loss, with racism and addiction and domestic abuse. Their stories, initially limited by the masterpieces that spawned them, continue on: they are not a closed book.
'In a vibrant commentary on literary patriarchy and the patriarchy beyond, this book considers the place of writing, critiquing, reading, performing and publishing poetry in a woman’s space.'
Source : publisher's blurb
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The Postcolonial Allegory and Its Transcendence : Trauma, Family, and the Future in The Bone People and Disgrace
2020
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Foreign Literatures , no. 4 2020; 'The Bone People and Disgrace are two renowned literary works devoted to the exploration of postcolonial racial problems in New Zealand and South Africa respectively. In those two novels, the protagonists, while trying to understand the vicissitudes of life, tend to be under the paradigmatic influence of postcolonial allegorical narratives, which try to embody the historical trajectories of interracial violence and injustice in individual existence; however, in living out a life that is irreducibly unique, they also exhibit a subjective agency that can transcend the negative legacy of colonialism.' (Publication abstract)
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The Personal Pilgrimage of David Lurie-or Why Coetzee's Disgrace Should and Should Not Be Read in Terms of an Ethics of Perception
2013
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Partial Answers : Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas , June vol. 11 no. 2 2013; (p. 233-255)'Through a reading of J. M. Coetzee's novel Disgrace this paper discusses the contemporary genre of reading literature in terms of an 'ethics of perception.' In the fourteen years since its publication the novel has elicited a rich body of commentary and criticism with an ethical edge, often focusing on the unfolding vision or stunted but developing perceptiveness of its uneasy protagonist David Lurie. This path of criticism is paradigmatic of a broader interest in studying literary works as paths to moral philosophical illumination. I discuss how the novel yields to this kind of reading, but also how this path of reading is complicated by its various other features, above all, a plurality of values that may be hard to reconcile and a Christian perspective of grace which is played against the novels secular, intellectual perspective on perceptiveness. I argue that reading Disgrace in terms of any pre-given ethical formula, however compelling, may be problematic considering the nature of Coetzee's authorship.' (Author's abstract)
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Towards an Ethics of Sensation in Coetzee's Disgrace
2009
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Literature and Sensation 2009; (p. 184-193) -
Miguel de Cervantes and J.M. Coetzee : An Unacknowledged Paternity
2013
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Journal of Literary Studies , vol. 29 no. 4 2013; (p. 80-97) 'This article points to the 17th-century Spanish writer, Miguel de Cervantes, as one important literary predecessor of the contemporary South African writer, J.M. Coetzee, a relation that has generally passed unnoticed among critics. This relation is brought to the foreground in Coetzee’s most recent novel, The Childhood of Jesus (2013), but it also underlies his previous ones, Age of Iron (1998), Disgrace (2000), and Slow Man (2005), as well as his critical pieces, “The Novel Today” (1988) and the “Jerusalem Prize Acceptance Speech” (1992b), all of which contain echoes of Cervantes’s masterpiece, Don Quixote ([1605, 1615]2005). My argument is that the conflict between imagination and reality, the novel and history, central in Coetzee’s fictional and non-fictional production, needs to be re-examined as a fundamentally Cervantine one. The adventures and fate of Don Quixote lie behind Coetzee’s exploration of whether literature may be an effective and ethical guide in our dealings with reality, whether the ordinary may be transformed into the extraordinary, and of the relation between the literary imagination and the onslaughts of the real world.' (Publisher's blurb) -
Feeling, Affect, Exposure : Ethical (In)capacity, the Sympathetic Imagination, and J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace
2013
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Mosaic , December vol. 46 no. 4 2013; (p. 1-19) 'This essay considers the role of feeling and affect in theories of the sympathetic imagination through readings of Martha Nussbaum, Geoffrey Hartman, and J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace. I explore how the sympathetic imagination is irreducibly contaminated by unstable affective states that threaten its viability as a humanist ethic. (Publication abstract) -
Literary Studies, The Animal Turn, and the Academy
2013
single work
— Appears in: Social Alternatives , vol. 32 no. 4 2013; (p. 6-14)‘The rapidly growing field of human-animal studies (HAS) is a vibrant, varied domain of methodological convergences and divergences, united by a shared concern with studying the complex entanglement of human and animal lives. To think seriously about animals on their own terms is to begin to question the co-construction of the categories of the human and the animal that underpins human the animal that underpins human exceptionalism. Unpicking the human/animal binary, however, is no simple matter: not only is this construction unstable but as prisoners of human language we also have a tendency to reinstate it even as we think we challenge it. This paper will provide an analysis of significant developments and preoccupations in the field of literary HAS. Some of the most vexing questions within this area will be contextualised by way of reference to the Bandit and Michael Vick cases in the US and J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, in particular scenes depicting David Laurie’s encounter with unwanted dogs at an animal shelter.’ (Publication abstract)
Awards
- 2008 shortlisted The Booker Prize — The Best of the Booker
- 2000 winner Commonwealth Writers Prize — Best Book: Africa Region
- 1999 winner The Booker Prize
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cSouth Africa,cSouthern Africa, Africa,
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Cape Town,
cSouth Africa,cSouthern Africa, Africa,
