Word: apartheid
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...exploration. Winner of the 1999 Booker Prize, Disgrace articulates the same concern as Coetzees 1990 novel Age of Iron, in which a retired Professor of Latins struggle with cancer is symbolic of the waning force of humanism. Until the 90s, humanism was the primary discourse of white opposition to apartheid. But the tenuous hope Coetzee expresses in Age of Iron for the survival of humanism despite the violence of South Africas transitional years (the late 80s and early 90s) seems to have been snuffed out in Disgrace. The novel is set in the current phase of the countrys violent...
...Petrus, who in the old days of apartheid would have been called boy even as a middle aged man and relegated to the ranks of simple farmhands, is the farms co-proprietor and a man of substance in the local black community. Lurie is unsure how to relate to Petrus: at first he seems determined to like him, the politically correct thing to do in the situation. But a shockingly violent incident involving Lucy changes everything. Suddenly Lurie is doubly disgracedfor his failure as a father to help his own daughter and for his abuse of the child-like student...
...Throughout her career, Gordimer has been a paragon of authorly virtue: a white writer in apartheid South Africa, she stood staunchly with what she always calls the liberation movement. Her fiction exposes the bleeding heart of South African society, and her eye is precise and unflinching. This is not to say that her fiction is nakedly ideological: rather, it speaks complex truths about human relationships and social realities. It shocks the reader with its honesty...
...these selections, we do get some flashes of the uncompromising clarity of moral vision that is apparent in her best fiction: but these glimpses of Gordimer at her best only serve in this context to accentuate the readers disappointment in the rest of the compilation. In 1959: What is Apartheid?, a transcript of a seminar given in Washington DC, we see the Gordimer who we know and admire. Her prose rings pure and true, like good crystal: simple and clear, but heavy with a kind of unexpected weight. This is the Gordimer who spoke because her words demanded...
This sounds very similiar to the South African government's justification for keeping black students out of white apartheid institutions. Bill Gates was a bad student--he never even finished school. In fact even Einstein, one of the smartest men, was a bad student at one time during his life. But does this make them stupid...