David Lurie's learning and the meaning of J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace

Wright, Laurence

Title: David Lurie's learning and the meaning of J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace
Creator: Wright, Laurence
Date: 2010
Type: text
Type: article
Identifier: vital:7063
Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007428
Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10520/EJC47864
Description: preprint
Description: One of the teasing characteristics of novels soused in literariness, like J.M. Coetzee’s, is their tendency to leak, to bleed, into vast inchoate terrains of intertextuality.The reader is constantly challenged to measure and assess their implications within or against the frail containing form of the story, much as Russian formalism taught us to keep sujet and fable in perpetual dialogue. However, it has become apparent that in the dense thickets of commentary occasioned by Coetzee’s most controversial novel, Disgrace (1999), insufficient attention has been paid to the intertextual implications of David Lurie’s learning, his scholarly preoccupations. Unless the reader attempts this kind of exploration, two of the most vexed issues freighting the novel’s central fabulation: Lucy’s curiously stoical, impassive response to her rape, together with her decision to stay on in South Africa; and David Lurie’s sudden, seemingly inexplicable care for the doomed dogs, from their last moments at the animal shelter until he lovingly consigns their corpses to the incinerator, must remain opaque. In particular, the final words of the novel, “Yes, I am giving him up” (220), uttered in relation to the immanent “Lösung” of the little dog Bev Shaw calls Driepoot, will tend to taunt the reader, rather than illuminate.
Format: 28 pages, pdf
Language: English
Relation: J.M. Coetzee's Austerities, Wright, L.S. (2010) David Lurie's learning and the meaning of J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace. In: J.M.Coetzee's Austerities. Ashgate, Farnham, Surrey, England, pp. 147-162, J.M. Coetzee's Austerities 147 162 2010 9780754668039
Rights: Wright, Laurence
Rights: Use of this resource is governed by the terms and conditions of the J.M.Coetzee's Austerities Self-archiving Policy

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Wright, Laurence (Prof)

RU Institute for the Study of English in Africa (ISEA)

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