Disgrace centers on David Lurie, a man well established in life and profession who discovers that all comforts can disappear in a very short amount of time. Lurie is an academic, a professor at a university in Cape Town, South Africa. During the course of the story, Lurie undergoes significant change. His university has recently been modified in both name and structure; it is no longer Cape Town University College, but Cape Town Technical University, and his department, formerly Classics and Modern Languages, has been completely dissolved, leaving him with only a couple of classes to teach in Communications. The changes in Lurie's life reflect the atmosphere of South Africa, which is being altered, politically and socially. As apartheid is finally being recognized as an unjust manner of social structuring, changes within the social fabric are being rendered. This becomes especially evident in the relationship between...