Sympathy And Empathy

J.M. Coetzee, a prominent contemporary novelist in South Africa, vaults to the laureate of Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003. One of his masterpieces, Disgrace, wins him a Booker Prize for a second time. This novel set in the post-apartheid new South Africa evolves around the protagonist David Lurie, a university professor intoxicated in European Romantic learning. After a series of suffering, Lurie takes an impressive transformation from a Byronic hero in life, indulging himself in love affair without confession, into a genuine Romantic scholar: sympathetic, justice-seeking, animal-caring, pursuing the real Romantic imagination in spirit. The repeated quotations and allusion of the lines by Romantic masters like William Wordsworth and Byron, in particular the enigmatic narration of the creation of the Byronic opera, Byron in Italy, creates a telling Romantic atmosphere in the novel. However, it does not take much effort to see that Lurie is actually a pseudo-scholar of Romanticism, who takes his indoctrinated tenet of Romanticism as an excuse for all his unjustified amoral behaviors in real life. After a series of suffering on his exile journey, a catalyst to his sympathy and empathy, Lurie is ethically sublimated to care about the unwanted dogs and contrite his past unethical behaviors and aesthetically sublimated to create a truly Romantic opera, Byron in Italy with sincere devotion. Hence, the enlightened sympathy and empathy become an elixir to Lurie’s disgrace.Therefore, this thesis purports to make a thematic study of Disgrace via a thorough textual analysis of the protagonist’s life experience and spiritual journey from a dandy Romantic professor to a redeemed Romantic scholar in both ethics and aesthetics. In so doing, this paper aims to reveal Coetzee’s literary concern in advocating the ethic and aesthetic function of literature by means of sympathy and empathy.