The Grammar of Provisionality in J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace

Coetzee's grammar of provisionality in Disgrace is the basis for its political and ethical claims. Disgrace challenges conceptions of the future that do not question their foundation, and language that, as he writes elsewhere, "does not as one of its habitual motions glance back skeptically at its premises." If Coetzee's first post-apartheid novel looks to a future, it does so with foreboding, warning of discourses situating themselves teleologically toward a fixed vision of the future.