Disgrace, by J.M Coetzee, is a deceivingly short book. On the surface it looks like a simple personal narrative, but it is much more complex than that. The novel not only deals with the delicate matter of rape, it also examines the intricate...

By comparing White Teeth with at least one other appropriate text, explore the presentation of family and family relationships in postcolonial literature.

The ‘metanarrative’ of Zadie Smith’s White Teeth differs from the direct linear narrative of...

The view that David Lurie is “not a bad man but not good either” is a reduction of a provocative character. Disgrace explores compelling political issues ranging from post-Apartheid South Africa to moral paternalism, and David’s placement in the...

“It is not politically correct to talk about white, poor people,” advised a senior official of Solidarity, a prominent South African trade union, during a visit of President Jacob Zuma to the impoverished white community of Bethlehem (Evans)....

It is universally accepted that, at the age of fifty-two, men should be courting women of similar ages. However, David Lurie, the protagonist of J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, does not comply with these standards. He is absolutely infatuated with women...

There are multiple works of art discussed in J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, including poems that the central character, David Lurie, teaches his class, dances, and Lurie’s opera. This brings up the question of why these works of art are included....

George Eliot’s The Lifted Veil explores the nature of human sympathy from the perspective of a supernatural, clairvoyant character. The narrator of the story, Latimer, uses his power of clairvoyance to analyze the sympathies of others, which...

“Hitherto I had given to Friday’s life as little thought as I would have a dog’s or any other dumb beast’s—less, indeed, for I had a horror of his mutilated state which made me shut him from my mind, and flinch away when he came near me.” (...

J.M. Coetzee’s 1986 novel Foe recounts the adventures and aspirations of Susan Barton, a fictional young woman who finds herself cast away on a most unusual island with the stolid Cruso and his tongueless slave Friday. The novel’s beginning takes...

Plot structure in any novel is an important literary technique that can differ greatly from one novel to another. While the actual story tells the reader the events that happen to the characters, the plot is the technique used to form a time line...

Decolonization is more difficult than simply removing the physical presence of the colonizer. Colonialism imprints on a multitude of levels on the lives of both the colonizer and colonized; the prospect of undoing years of institutionalized and...

History, empire, and the individual are all in a strained relationship. Empire functions by organizing, structuring, categorizing, and separating its peoples into different disciplines of the empire for the purpose of efficiency. This creates...

Both Waiting for the Barbarians by J. M. Coetzee and The Drowned and the Saved by Primo Levi deal with the weighty themes of dehumanization, oppression, and the darkest sides of humanity. Similarities between the apparatus of oppression depicted...

Donna Haraway’s seminal posthumanist essay “A Cyborg Manifesto” engages with the argument that humans and non-human animals are not such disparate categories and that these the categories that reduce and restrict definitions are far messier than...

In J.M Coetzee’s Age of Iron, Mrs Elizabeth Curren recounts the life-altering events of her last days battling cancer in a letter to her estranged daughter. The novel is set in Cape Town, South Africa in 1986-89 - a time of division, injustice and...