South Africa in Literature. A Colonized or Decolonized Country?

Academic Paper from the year 2014 in the subject Didactics - English - Literature, Works, grade: 1, University of Vienna, course: Literary Theory, language: English, abstract: Post-colonialism is a complex multifarious phenomenon rooted in the history of imperialism which relates to a large number of nations and countries touched by colonization. This paper aims to apply the main tenets of postcolonial studies on the novel "Disgrace" (1999) by J. M. Coetzee. This novel leaves the reader with uncomfortable, unanswerable questions of parental relationship, historically-solidified hierarchy of black and white people, language hybridization, grace and disgrace.

However, these issues are approached from a quite different perspective. The writer attempts to shed light on this standpoint wherein the decolonized status of black South Africans and helplessness of David Lurie, a white professor from the westernized city of Cape Town, in Eastern Cape are depicted via deconstruction of the long-standing but stagnant and fading binary opposition of white superiority and black inferiority.