Disgrace

Product Description

Disgrace by J M Coetzee takes as its complex central character 52-year-old English professor David Lurie, whose preoccupation with Romantic poetry
- & romancing his students
- threatens to turn him into “a moral dinosaur.” When called to account, David refuses to apologise to the university for a brief affair with a student, drawing on poetry before political correctness. He seeks refuge with his quietly progressive daughter Lucie on her isolated small holding but cannot escape the violent dilemmas of the new South Africa. The tentative emotional truce between daughter & father is broken when a traumatic event forces Lucie to an appalling disgrace. Called to account by the university for a passionate but brief affair with a student who is ambivalent about his embraces, David refuses to apologise, drawing on poetry before what he regards as political correctness in his claim that his ”case rests on the rights of desire.” Seeking refuge with his quietly progressive daughter Lucie on her isolated small holding, David finds that the violent dilemmas of the new South Africa are inescapable when the tentative emotional truce between errant father & daughter is ripped apart by a traumatic event that forces Lucie to an appalling disgrace. Disgrace is, above all, a novel about accountability, about individual dilemmas against the backdrop of a changing society that become a metaphor for historical accountability or its lack.