Abstract

This article explores literature as a means for understanding the nature and implications of violence against women. In particular, it seeks to illustrate the ways a literary work can deepen and complexify discussions of violence against women, and its enabling conditions, within an individual and broader society. The work to be examined is J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, and I focus on a particular aspect of the novel—viz. the affair, and the aftermath of the affair, between middle-aged communications professor, David Lurie, and a student from his Romantic poetry class, Melanie Isaacs. I show how the Lurie–Melanie episode links sexual violence to bureaucratic, disenchanted, and intellectualistic ways of thinking. I also suggest that, in later parts of Disgrace, the possibilities for other attitudes—to sex and to education—are glimpsed. That we glimpse these through the figure of David Lurie—who at the start of the novel believes he has ‘solved’ the problem of sex—makes Coetzee’s novel a particularly interesting case study for considering the education of literature in a time of sexual violence.