“along a road that may lead nowhere”: J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace and the Postsecular Novel

While the novels of J. M. Coetzee have received critical attention mainly for their political and ethical concerns, Coetzee’s later fiction turns to questions of religion’s potential to guide the search for value. Situating Coetzee between strident secularism on the one hand and sanguine postsecularism on the other, I show how religious questions are central to his most famous work, Disgrace. I argue that Coetzee deflates inherited forms of Romantic and modernist epiphany into irresolution and lack of transformation to instead create an anti-epiphany, one that recasts traditional understandings of literary and religious insight in order to explore more tentative and gradual reorientations. Drawn from a modest and careful, but open and curious, engagement with religion after secularism, these modes privilege giftedness and bearing others’ burdens. More broadly, this reading develops the relationship between modernism and contemporary literature and further challenges the dominant understanding of the novel as a secularizing form.