Some Research for your Coetzee Essay

Greetings Novel Students--

As we discussed in class you should come to our last class on Tuesday with a draft or at least an outline for your final essay on Coetzee.  We will discuss your work in class.

As always you should plan to quote from the text and develop a claim that you support with examples, and include a works cited entry.

You may also, for extra credit write a short poem related to any of the themes, characters, symbols we have discussed in The Novel course.

I've asked you to do a little research and include one source in your final essay.  Here are some sample published essays on Coetzee with a few quotations:

—“But change David does.  And the transmutation is precipitated by what Martin Buber calls ‘tiny episodes’ if reciprocity and exchange with animals.  In being close to animals (even when they are dead), in learning from them, and in dwelling amongst them, David’s capacity for sympathy is broadened” (480).

—“Put at its starkest, the novel’s articulation of disgrace cannot succeed without animals” (472).

—“As David descends deeper into his disgrace, he travels alongside the animals that share his fate” (   ) 

——He actually has to stop at the roadside to recover himself; tears flow down his face that he cannot stop, his hands shake.  He  does not understand what is happening to him” (143).

—Herron, Tom.  “The Dog Man: Becoming animal in Coetzee’s Disgrace.” Twentieth   Century Literature. Vol. 51 (4) Winter 2005: 467-490.

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—The novel is criticized for reproducing stereotypical representations of black and white relationships in South Africa.

—“Lucy accepts her fate as a symbol of the redistribution of power in postapartheid South Africa and sees her rapists as gathering apartheid debts” (74).

—“. . .when it comes to representing herself as a rape victim. . . .If she presses charges, the gendered dimension of the rape will immediately be recuperated by a racially motivated reading and reify social hierarchies that have historically been produced. . .through the link between rape and the construction of race” (75).

—“. . .one may speculate that her refusal to seek legal redress is indeed linked to her awareness of the history of ‘black peril’ scares and their justification of black oppression” (76).

Mardorossian, Carine M. “Rape and the Violence of Representation in J.M Coetzee’s   Disgrace. Research in African Literatures. Vol. 42 (4) (Winter 2011): 72-83.

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—What is David’s fall from grace?  Thinks about castration—body as enemy

—Ageing men and women are disgraceful: his own sexual activity is described disparagingly—”a man exercising himself on the body of a woman”

—Loss of authority also intellectual: he is castrated in the “emasculated institution of learning (4)

—Self-disgust, uselessness, loss of authority—that links David’s sense of being “out of place” with the unwanted animals of Bev Shaw’s animal refuge” (Kossew 157).

—“David, paradoxically, falls from grace because of his inability to question the authority of desire itself and in this he is slave to his bodily instincts.  All mind, he falls prey to the body” (158)

—“In offering himself to the service of dead dogs selfish David finds a kind of grace” (160)

—Kossew, Sue. “The Politics of Shame and Redemption in J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace.” Research in African Literatures. Vol 34 (2) (Summer 2003: 155-162.