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Context Literature / Disgrace

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1[[quoteright:325:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/disgrace.jpg]]
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31999 Booker Prize-winning novel by South African author J. M. Coetzee.
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5Just as the apartheid days are coming to a close, twice-divorced Cape Town lecturer David Lurie is dismissed from his university post after an affair with one of his students. Beset by scandal, he relocates to his daughter Lucy's farm in the Eastern Cape, and under her influence begins to find a harmonious new lease of life. The tranquility proves short-lived, however, when they are subjected to a horrific attack, which brings the faultlines in David's relationship with his daughter and with their black neighbours to the fore.
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7!!This work contains examples of:
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9* AlliterativeName: Lucy Lurie.
10* AmicablyDivorced: David and his second wife Rosalind are still friends and regularly meet each other.
11* ByronicHero: David Lurie is a textbook example. He's even working on an opera about Lord Byron, which is probably Coetzee's way of lampshading it.
12* CallingTheOldManOut: Lucy calls out David on his self-absorbed nature near the end of the novel.
13%%ZCE* [[spoiler: ChildByRape]]
14* EthnicMenialLabor: Petrus was this during the apartheid years. Since the democratic transition, he's acquired some land of his own.
15* HeteronormativeCrusader: It's implied that the gang rape of Lucy, a lesbian, was in part motivated by homophobia.
16* ImAManICantHelpIt: One of the ways David rationalises his destructive sexual behaviour.
17* MoralMyopia: David Lurie is naturally outraged by the gang rape of his daughter Lucy, though early in the book he himself has non-consensual sex with a vulnerable student, which in his narration he insists is "not quite rape".
18* NotSoDifferentRemark: A dark example, in which David comes to realise that, by his exploitation of an unwilling student, he is little different from the men who raped his daughter.
19* NoWomansLand: South Africa, if the parade of misogynists and rapists (including the main character) is anything to go by.

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