Disgrace is the story of a South African professor of English who loses everything: his reputation, his job, his peace of mind, his good looks, his dreams of artistic success, and finally even his ability to protect his own daughter.
Based on Nobel Prize winner J.M. Coetzee’s novel, this film tells the story of David Lurie (played by John Malkovich), twice-divorced and dissatisfied with his job as a Communications professor, teaching one specialized class in Romantic literature at a technical university in Cape Town in post-apartheid South Africa. His "disgrace" comes when he seduces one of his students and he does nothing to protect himself from its consequences. Lurie was working on Lord Byron at the time of his disgrace, and "the irony is that he comes to grief from an escapade that Byron would have thought distinctly timid." He is dismissed from his teaching position, after which he takes refuge on his daughter's farm in the Eastern Cape. For a time, his daughter's influence and natural rhythms of the farm promise to harmonise his discordant life. But soon they are brought back to a harsh reality.
Disgrace demands critical and involved viewing/reading. According to The Guardian, "any novel set in post-apartheid South Africa is fated to be read as a political portrait, but the fascination of Disgrace is the way it both encourages and contests such a reading by holding extreme alternatives in tension, salvation, ruin." The novel takes its inspiration from South Africa's contemporary social and political conflict, and offers a bleak look at the country.

Wednesday 21 April, Room 601, 20:00
This event is hosted by the Xolo Student Society.

Uniwersytet im. Adama Mickiewicza w Poznaniu



Wydział Anglistyki













Niderlandy RPA w UAM

Dutch & South African Studies Poznań