Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- I Reading Disgrace
- II Reading Disgrace with Others
- 11 Community Reading: Teaching Disgrace in an Alternative College Classroom
- 12 Out of the Father's House into a Community of Readers
- 13 Sympathy for the Devil: On the Perversity of Teaching Disgrace
- 14 Teaching Disgrace in the Large Lecture Classroom
- 15 Discussing Disgrace in a Critical Theory Class
- 16 Disgrace in the Classroom: A Tale of Two Teaching Strategies
- 17 The Bodies of Others: A Meditation on the Environs of Reading J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace and Caryl Phillips's The Nature of Blood
- 18 Disgrace as a Teacher
- Works Cited
- Notes on the Contributors
- Index
17 - The Bodies of Others: A Meditation on the Environs of Reading J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace and Caryl Phillips's The Nature of Blood
from II - Reading Disgrace with Others
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- I Reading Disgrace
- II Reading Disgrace with Others
- 11 Community Reading: Teaching Disgrace in an Alternative College Classroom
- 12 Out of the Father's House into a Community of Readers
- 13 Sympathy for the Devil: On the Perversity of Teaching Disgrace
- 14 Teaching Disgrace in the Large Lecture Classroom
- 15 Discussing Disgrace in a Critical Theory Class
- 16 Disgrace in the Classroom: A Tale of Two Teaching Strategies
- 17 The Bodies of Others: A Meditation on the Environs of Reading J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace and Caryl Phillips's The Nature of Blood
- 18 Disgrace as a Teacher
- Works Cited
- Notes on the Contributors
- Index
Summary
I begin at an open window, leaning on the sill to feel the air outside, a cold breeze on my skin. I'm looking out across a fenced zone, barbed wire and concrete wall, beyond that a road I can't see but for the tops of vans, small trucks going by, the sound of tires, and beyond that a field fringed by trees in the middle of February, gray and misting, near freezing, but not quite. Beyond those trees, maybe a river. I don't know.
I'm finding likeness, looking at a scene that, but for the wall and wire, could come from the late February landscape of central Pennsylvania, let's say in the early sixties when I was ten or so and out roaming the woods, so often confidently by myself or with the family dog following trails and bushwhacking, climbing, sliding, tramping across the stream that ran through our property, warmed by my exertions but feeling also the marvelous edge of cold. This memory returns often enough to be emblematic of a self I understand to be the girl I carry with me as I'm aging. There she is — agile, cheerful, thoughtful, a spring in her step, excited by the heat she can build inside her against the cold, but delighted also by what the cold gives her, the sense of living in her own skin. Her body creates itself, is its own weather system pushing into the bank of frigid air.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Encountering 'Disgrace'Reading and Teaching Coetzee's Novel, pp. 313 - 329Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2009