Fluent Essays

Pretending you are an archeologist, examine Reinharts and McDonalds essays. What would you say are the primary values of those who write such essays and how are these values reflected in the conventions, language, and features of the two essays?  Length: 1 page, double-spaced.4: Disgrace and the Neighbor: An Interchange with Bill McDonald Kenneth Reinhard IN HIS ESSAY, “‘IS IT TO LATE TO EDUCATE THE EYE?’: David Lurie, Richard of St. Victor, and ‘vision as eros’ in Disgrace,” Bill McDonald is primarily concerned with the nature of erotic vision in Coetzee’s novel, and the pos- sibilities — and limitations — of the redemption that vision represents. The central character in Disgrace, David Lurie, is a literary critic, and McDonald has taken seriously the account we are given of Lurie’s main scholarly works, in particular, his monograph on the twelfth-century Christian mys- tic, Richard of St. Victor. McDonald shows how this work, as well as Lurie’s books on Boito’s opera Mefistofele and Wordsworth’s sense of history, informs the development of Lurie’s character, as well as Coetzee’s novel on a more structural level. McDonald describes the transformation of Lurie’s “disgrace” into a kind of “grace,” parallel with, as McDonald writes, “the contemplative, ascetic spirit” if not the precise stages of the soul’s journey to redemption described in Richard’s writings. Coetzee’s novel, however, works in a modernist or perhaps postmodernist mode, with an ambiguous conclusion — ironic, ambivalent, indeed, according to McDonald, incon- clusive. Although he does not discuss in detail the surprisingly harsh criti- cism Disgrace has received for the various perspectives on post-apartheid South Africa that some readers have attributed to it, McDonald makes it clear that the novel’s politics must not be understood as either an independ- ent issue or as an allegorical counterpart to the various sexual relationships presented in it. Rather, the politics of Coetzee’s novel are intrinsically erotic. No “vision” that the novel may present for the future of South Africa can be separated from the varieties of violent sexual experience it represents or imagines, from seduction and rape to prostitution and adultery. Moreover, McDonald shows how this violence is not merely understood as associated with sexuality, as we might expect, but with love; such “violent love” may not only be inevitable in the traumatized landscape of South Africa, it may be the very condition of salvation. As McDonald indicates, such an account of love’s salutary violence is central to Richard of St. Victor’s thinking, especially in his Four Degrees of Violent Charity, as is evi- dent from its title (“charity” of course is the translation of caritas, the Latin version of agape, used by early Christianity to signify non-erotic modes of Encountering Disgrace : Reading and Teaching Coetzees Novel, edited by Bill McDonald, Boydell & Brewer, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csusb/detail.action?docID=3003700. Created from csusb on 2018-01-17 14:16:47. C op yr ig ht © 2 00 9. B oy de ll & B re w er . A ll rig ht s re se rv ed . 94 ! KENNETH REINHARD love). McDonald’s reading do3: “Is it too late to educate the eye?”: David Lurie, Richard of St. Victor, and “vision as eros” in Disgrace Bill McDonald In your own Bosom you bear your Heaven And earth, & all that you behold, tho’ it appears Without, it is Within In your Imagination, of which this world of Mortality is but Shadow. — Blake, Jerusalem I DAVID LURIE’S PAST IS LARGELY A BLANK SLATE to readers of Disgrace. We know only a few things about his academic career, and even less about his upbringing, marriages, politics, and religion. We do learn, in a fast-moving paragraph, that David was raised “in a family of women. As mother, aunts, sisters fell away, they were replaced in due course by mis- tresses, wives, a daughter. The company of women made him a lover of women and, to an extent, a womanizer. . . . That was how he lived for years, for decades, that was the backbone of his life” (7). Mothers and sisters, aunts and wives, then a little later “tourists” and “wives of col- leagues” (7) appear, then immediately “fall away” from our view, with only Rosalind, wife number two, surviving the sentences that created her. We are left largely with surmises: that he received some musical educa- tion, went somewhere to graduate school, has taught for something like a quarter of a century, and thought a photograph of his mother as a young woman worth displaying (15). It’s hard to imagine him with sis- ters. We also know that David wrote and published three books in earlier phases of his academic career. None of them “caused a stir or even a rip- ple” (4). Though he is “tired of criticism” now, these books that he wrote about “dead people” once commanded his “heart” (162). It gradually becomes clear that the subjects of these books, though unremarked by David’s peers, have remained very much in play in his consciousness and especially his subliminal life, inaugurating, even shaping, aspects of his Encountering Disgrace : Reading and Teaching Coetzees Novel, edited by Bill McDonald, Boydell & Brewer, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csusb/detail.action?docID=3003700. Created from csusb on 2018-01-17 14:04:00. C op yr ig ht © 2 00 9. B oy de ll & B re w er . A ll rig ht s re se rv ed . LURIE, RICHARD OF ST. VICTOR & “VISION AS EROS” IN DISGRACE ! 65 present experience. Two of them — Boito and the Faust Legend: The Genesis of Mefistofele, and Wordsworth and the Burden of the Past — do so in immediately apparent ways; the slow evolution of David’s own opera on Byron and Teresa Guiccioli runs throughout the story, and his specializa- tion in Romanticism — “Wordsworth has been one of my masters” (13) — yields the two classroom scenes we visit, as well as several other impor- tant passages in his narrative. Sandwiched in between, however, is a seem- ingly anomalous project, The Vision of Richard of St. Victor. The writings of an ascetic Scots contemplative in a medieval Frenc