“J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace and the Task of the Imagination”

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/jml/summary/v029/29.2marais.html

This article takes a look at an early review of Disgrace done by Jane Taylor in which she claims that the novel invokes 18th century notions of sympathy, compassion, and sensibility and that they were self-consciously developed as an ethical response to the European Enlightenment idea that each individual is conceived of as a living consciousness separated completely from all other consciousnesses. She notes that Coetzee’s postulation of the sympathetic imagination may potentially corrective in regards to the violence attendant on monadic individuality.

The authr then goes on to state that Coetzee bestows the ethical obligation of developing a sympathetic imagination and places Lurie in situations in which said imagination allows him to grow. He goes on to state that while Disgrace may establish the possibility of sympathetic imagination development, it simultaneously undermines it, therefore questioning the ability of the imagination to fulfill its full potential and achieve that which it is meant to achieve.