The Indeterminant Characterization of David Lurie in Coetzee’s Disgrace through Reader-Response Criticism

Abstract

The current article tries to probe into reader-response criticism, which “focuses on readers’ responses to literary texts” (Tyson, 2006, p. 169). The paper alludes to John Maxwell Coetzee whose artistic works are being published globally and multilingually, and they have been read or interpreted in starkly different ways based on opposing perspectives that range from being African to European, local to global, black to white, and relevant to “beside the point” (Beckett as cited in Hayes, 2010, p. 46). Out of Coetzee’s oeuvre, the researcher has selected his novel Disgrace, for it contains an indeterminate characterization of the White protagonist living in the big city or even surviving among the Black majority in the countryside of post-apartheid South Africa. Consequently, different readers would have different attitudes towards the same character. The analysis of the novel is further fortified by referring to acclaimed reader-response theorists as Gerwel, Justman, Rosenblatt, Pike, Marais, and Hayes. The main conclusion drawn from the studied reader-response concepts, the critical and creative pens of Coetzee, the viewpoints of the novel critics, and their discussion by the current researcher is that the reading of the same text have different interpretations by different readers, and sometimes even by the same reader between two periods of time. However, this needs to be considered as an enrichment for the text and its levels of significance.