My Thesis Project,, Disgrace novel @ Post Colonilaism Studies

DISGRACE

Disgrace is a 1999 novel by South African-born author J. M. Coetzee, winner of the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature; the book itself won the Booker Prize in 1999, the year in which it was published. A 2006 poll of "literary luminaries" by The Observer newspaper named it as the "greatest novel of the last 25 years" written in English outside the United States.^[1]
A motion picture adaptation starring John Malkovich as David Lurie had its world premiere at the Toronto Film Festival in 2008, where it won the International Critics' Award.

Short Summary

Disgrace is the story of a South African professor of English descent who loses everything: his reputation, his job, his peace of mind, his good looks, his dreams of artistic success, and finally even his ability to protect his cherished daughter.
The novel tells the story of David Lurie, twice-divorced and dissatisfied with his job as a Communications professor, teaching one specialized class in Romantic literature at a technical university in Cape Town in post-apartheid South Africa. His "disgrace" comes when he seduces one of his students and he does nothing to protect himself from its consequences. Lurie was working on Lord Byron at the time of his disgrace, and "the irony is that he comes to grief from an escapade that Byron would have thought distinctly timid."^[2] He is dismissed from his teaching position, after which he takes refuge on his daughter's farm in the Eastern Cape. For a time, his daughter's influence and natural rhythms of the farm promise to harmonise his discordant life. But the balance of power in the country is shifting. Shortly after becoming comfortable with rural life, he is forced to come to terms with the aftermath of an attack on the farm in which his daughter is raped and impregnated and he is violently assaulted. In Disgrace, those who feel disgraced are also those who are punished.