Fluent Essays

English 3060 Spring 2021 Group Summary of Reinhard Please work with your group (or individually) to summarize Reinhard’s article. Your summary should be two pages long, in MLA format, listing the name of each participant in your breakout room who attended and contributed for the entire session. To begin your summary, tell who wrote the essay, the name of the essay, and what the writer’s main point or project is.  As with McDonald’s you should be able to do this is one short paragraph.  (For example: In his essay, “ Disgrace and the Neighbor: An Interchange with Bill McDonald,” Coetzee scholar Kenneth Reinhard responds to Bill McDonald’s essay, arguing against McDonald’s thesis that David Lurie changes. It is Reinhart’s thesis that David Lurie does not undergo significant change in the novel. In answering McDonald, Reinhard analyzes each of Lurie’s changed vision in the context of two sets of questions—one regarding the redemptive potential of change in vision and the second regarding what it means to love one’s neighbor. Reinhard devotes the first 1 ½ pages to this contextualization. In the middle of page 2, he announces his own project: he will respond to McDonald by questioning the redemptive nature of vision AND also questioning neighbor love. Reinhard then sets about defining and contextualizing the significance of erotic vision. On page 96, he begins his analysis of the three visions set forth by McDonald, addressing the limitations of each vision to indicate real change in Lurie. This might be the heart of your summary. Reinhard moves from his analysis of the three visions to an analysis of neighborly love in Disgrace and the problems of living side-by-side with those whose presence may be a challenge. He places his case for the novel’s redemption in Lucy and her “blindness” to the evils she has suffered. Once again your summary should be 2 pages long, double-spaced in MLA format.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 do