The Disgrace Controversy - Professor David Attwell (University of York)

Professor David Attwell, Emeritus Professor at the University of York and Extraordinary Professor at the University of the Western Cape, discusses the controversy surrounding Disgrace (1999), the most studied and written about novel in all of South Africa’s literary history, by the country’s most famous writer: the Booker and Nobel Prize winning J.M. Coetzee. Prof Attwell explores and explains the intense public debate that arose in response to the novel’s depiction of unequal power relations as enacted through racial tensions and sexual violence. Through close analysis of the protagonist, David Lurie, and his relationships in the novel, Prof Attwell shows how Disgrace tussles with complex questions of guilt, complicity, ethical recovery, and the legacies of colonialism in a post-apartheid context.

Further Reading

Derek Attridge, ‘J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace: Introduction’, Interventions 4.3 (2002), 315-320

Derek Attridge and David Attwell, The Cambridge History of South African Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2012)

David Attwell, ‘Race in Disgrace’, Interventions 4.3 (2002), 331-341

---, J.M. Coetzee & The Life of Writing (Oxford University Press, 2015)

Rita Barnard, ‘J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace and the South African Pastoral’, Contemporary Literature 44.2 (Summer 2003), 199-224

J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace (Secker & Warburg, 1999)

Lucy Valerie Graham, ‘Reading the Unspeakable: Rape in J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace’, Journal of Southern African Studies 29.2 (2003), 433-444

Lucy Valerie Graham and Andrew van der Vlies, eds., The Bloomsbury Handbook to J.M. Coetzee (Bloomsbury 2023)

Dominic Head, The Cambridge Introduction to J.M. Coetzee (Cambridge University Press, 2012)

Steve Jacobs, dir., Disgrace [film] (2008)

Mike Marais, ‘The possibility of ethical action: J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace’, Scrutiny2 5.1 (2000), 57-63

Jarad Zimbler, ed., The Cambridge Companion to J.M. Coetzee (Cambridge University Press, 2020)