image of person or book cover 5053686626706765727.jpg
This image has been sourced from online.
y separately published work icon Disgrace single work   novel  
Issue Details: First known date: 1999... 1999 Disgrace
The material on this page is available to AustLit subscribers. If you are a subscriber or are from a subscribing organisation, please log in to gain full access. To explore options for subscribing to this unique teaching, research, and publishing resource for Australian culture and storytelling, please contact us or find out more.

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)

Exhibitions

18388238
18387981

Adaptations

form y separately published work icon Disgrace Anna-Maria Monticelli , ( 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

    • London,
      c
      England,
      c
      c
      United Kingdom (UK),
      c
      Western Europe, Europe,
      :
      Secker and Warburg ,
      1999 .
      image of person or book cover 5053686626706765727.jpg
      This image has been sourced from online.
      Extent: 219p.
      Edition info: 1st ed.
      Note/s:
      • The first edition, first printing (identified by the line '2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1' on the verso of the title page), exists in two states: the first issue printed by Biddles, and the second issue printed by Clays; the printer is indicated on the verso of the title page.
      ISBN: 0436204894, 9780436204890
    • New York (City), New York (State),
      c
      United States of America (USA),
      c
      Americas,
      :
      Viking ,
      1999 .
      image of person or book cover 7058266373909139516.jpg
      Image courtesy of publisher's website.
      Extent: 220p.
      Note/s:
      • Reprinted photographically from the Secker and Warburg edition.
      ISBN: 9780670887316, 0670887315
    • Bath, Somerset,
      c
      England,
      c
      c
      United Kingdom (UK),
      c
      Western Europe, Europe,
      :
      Chivers ,
      2000 .
      image of person or book cover 3777082367699423258.jpg
      Image courtesy of publisher's website.
      Extent: 295p.p.
      Edition info: 1st large print ed.
      Note/s:
      • Edition for the visually impaired.
      ISBN: 0754014126, 9780754014126
    • New York (City), New York (State),
      c
      United States of America (USA),
      c
      Americas,
      :
      Penguin Books ,
      2000 .
      image of person or book cover 742461472910568275.jpg
      Image courtesy of publisher's website.
      Extent: 220p.
      ISBN: 9780140296402, 0140296409
    • London,
      c
      England,
      c
      c
      United Kingdom (UK),
      c
      Western Europe, Europe,
      :
      Vintage UK ,
      2000 .
      image of person or book cover 8928362446561007069.jpg
      Image courtesy of publisher's website.
      Extent: 219p.
      ISBN: 9780099289524, 0099289520
    • New York (City), New York (State),
      c
      United States of America (USA),
      c
      Americas,
      :
      Penguin Books ,
      2005 .
      image of person or book cover 3304472486104226055.jpg
      Image courtesy of publisher's website.
      Extent: 220p.
      ISBN: 0143036378, 9780143036371
    • New York (City), New York (State),
      c
      United States of America (USA),
      c
      Americas,
      :
      Penguin Books ,
      2008 .
      image of person or book cover 860068274008270947.jpg
      Image courtesy of publisher's website.
      Extent: 220p.
      ISBN: 9780143115281, 0143115286
    • London,
      c
      England,
      c
      c
      United Kingdom (UK),
      c
      Western Europe, Europe,
      :
      Vintage UK ,
      2008 .
      image of person or book cover 1789798601806784788.jpg
      Image courtesy of publisher's website.
      Extent: 220p.
      ISBN: 9780099526834, 0099526832
    • London,
      c
      England,
      c
      c
      United Kingdom (UK),
      c
      Western Europe, Europe,
      :
      Vintage UK ,
      2009 .
      image of person or book cover 1766461457415287758.jpg
      This image has been sourced from online.
      Extent: 219p.
      ISBN: 9780099535140, 0099535149
    • London,
      c
      England,
      c
      c
      United Kingdom (UK),
      c
      Western Europe, Europe,
      :
      Vintage UK ,
      2010 .
      image of person or book cover 3549314458711002252.jpg
      This image has been sourced from online.
      Extent: 240p.
      Edition info: Reading guide edition.
      ISBN: 9780099540984, 0099540983
    • London,
      c
      England,
      c
      c
      United Kingdom (UK),
      c
      Western Europe, Europe,
      :
      Harvill Secker ,
      2010 .
      image of person or book cover 2394120439380621046.jpg
      Image courtesy of publisher's website.
      Extent: 224p.
      Limited edition info: Limited centenary ed.
      ISBN: 9781846553905, 1846553903
    • London,
      c
      England,
      c
      c
      United Kingdom (UK),
      c
      Western Europe, Europe,
      :
      Vintage UK ,
      2011 .
      image of person or book cover 2870689282064742222.jpg
      Image courtesy of publisher's website.
      Extent: 219p.
      Limited edition info: Vintage 21st birthday ed.
      ISBN: 9780099563129, 0099563126
    • London,
      c
      England,
      c
      c
      United Kingdom (UK),
      c
      Western Europe, Europe,
      :
      Folio Society ,
      2011 .
      image of person or book cover 1987725767434269355.jpg
      This image has been sourced from online.
      Extent: 205p.
      Description: col. illus.
      Note/s:
      • Includes an introduction by Christopher Hope.
    • Melbourne, Victoria,: Text Publishing , 2019 .
      image of person or book cover 7013469828988254425.jpg
      Cover image courtesy of publisher.
      Extent: 220 p.p.
      Note/s:
      • Published 2 July 2019.
      • Introduction by Eva Hornung.
      ISBN: 9781925773859, 9781925774627 (ebook)
Alternative title: In ongenade
Language: Dutch
    • Amsterdam,
      c
      Netherlands,
      c
      Western Europe, Europe,
      :
      Ambo/Anthos ,
      1999 .
      image of person or book cover 3085490277514973555.jpg
      This image has been sourced from online.
      Extent: 189p.
      Edition info: 1st ed.
      Reprinted: Reprinted with 15 printings through 2003, with identical ISBN.
      ISBN: 9026316089, 9789026316081
    • The Hague,
      c
      Netherlands,
      c
      Western Europe, Europe,
      :
      Stichting Uitgeverij XL ,
      2001 .
      Extent: 304p.
      Edition info: Large print ed.
      ISBN: 9055426962, 9789055426966
      Series: y separately published work icon XL The Hague : Stichting Uitgeverij XL , 1994- 7962272 1994 series - publisher novel

      A series of large-print books published by Stichting Uitgeverij XL. Translations of J. M. Coetzee's novels feature in this series.

      Number in series: 696
    • Amsterdam,
      c
      Netherlands,
      c
      Western Europe, Europe,
      :
      Cossee ,
      2003 .
      image of person or book cover 3761440980922273582.jpg
      This image has been sourced from online.
      Extent: 253p.
      Edition info: 2nd ed.
      ISBN: 905936046X, 9789059360464
    • Amsterdam,
      c
      Netherlands,
      c
      Western Europe, Europe,
      :
      Cossee ,
      2007 .
      image of person or book cover 6702874039535139064.jpg
      This image has been sourced from online.
      Extent: 252p.
      ISBN: 905936175X, 9789059361751
    • Amsterdam,
      c
      Netherlands,
      c
      Western Europe, Europe,
      :
      Cossee ,
      2011 .
      image of person or book cover 3987515851811423363.jpg
      Image courtesy of publisher's website.
      Extent: 253p.
      Edition info: Theatre edition.
      ISBN: 9059363574, 9789059363571
    • Amsterdam,
      c
      Netherlands,
      c
      Western Europe, Europe,
      :
      Cossee ,
      2012 .
      image of person or book cover 1193477435264503876.jpg
      This image has been sourced from online.
      Extent: 256p.
      Edition info: 10th ed.
      ISBN: 9059363523, 9789059363526
    • Amsterdam,
      c
      Netherlands,
      c
      Western Europe, Europe,
      :
      Cossee ,
      2014 .
      image of person or book cover 5927356995351701708.jpg
      Image courtesy of publisher's website.
      Extent: 256p.
      Edition info: 13th ed.
      ISBN: 9059364562, 9789059364561

Other Formats

  • Large print.
  • Sound recording.

Works about this Work

J.M. Coetzee’s Provocative First Book Turns 50 This Year – and His Most Controversial Turns 25 Andrew Van Der Vlies , 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 Chris Holmes , 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 Craig Smith , 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)

y separately published work icon Rhymes with Hyenas Heather Taylor Johnson , 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

The Postcolonial Allegory and Its Transcendence : Trauma, Family, and the Future in The Bone People and Disgrace Tan Yanwei , 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)
The Personal Pilgrimage of David Lurie-or Why Coetzee's Disgrace Should and Should Not Be Read in Terms of an Ethics of Perception Nora Hämäläinen , 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)

Towards an Ethics of Sensation in Coetzee's Disgrace Suzie Gibson , 2009 single work criticism
— Appears in: Literature and Sensation 2009; (p. 184-193)
Miguel de Cervantes and J.M. Coetzee : An Unacknowledged Paternity María J. López , 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 Philip Dickinson , 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 Jennifer McDonell , 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

Last amended 17 Jun 2021 15:43:53
X