고려대학교

초록/요약

This essay examines how Coetzee's Disgrace embodies a mode of reflectivity, requiring a reflective distance to the conventional understanding of human life and relationships. In its high-minded pursuit of moral substance, some prior criticism on Disgrace tends to downplay the reader's role in interpretation, reducing the work’s meaning on the context from which it arose, overlooking the text’s aesthetic form. By contrast, this paper suggests Disgrace’s meaning is not exhausted by its original context, also proposing the text’s ethical issues and problems are not confined only in the work’s moral content, but inseparably related to the text’s form. In advancing this view, this essay examines how this novel shows that the complexity of Lurie's existence infiltrates the very form of the work, not just its content. Against some critics’ complaining that the work’s ethical dimension of the form does not provide moral guidance to our concrete lives, this paper views the work’s aesthetic reticence to engage in active ethical normativeness as the work’s deliberate narrative strategy to alert the main character reflectively to the complexities of human life and condition beyond problem solving attitude of life, as Lurie by and large fleshes out his moral case, for example, turning it into his own mode of fictional opera. Coetzee's work, in which the formal and moral notably hard to separate, in turn sensitizes readers reflectively to the intricacies of moral issues of the work.