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In 1919 T.S. Eliot famously stated that 'not only the best, but the most individual parts of [a poet's] work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously' (Eliot, 1975: 38). Eliot's defence of literary value as necessarily tied to the literary text's relation to other texts is part of a long critical line in Western thought. His innovative contribution, however, lay in his understanding of the two directions in which literary influence moves: it is not only that a work of art cannot be understood without its predecessors, but that the meaning of the works of the past is influenced and transformed in the light of their present heirs. Certainly, if there is a contemporary writer who has enriched and complicated our understanding of literary works from a wide range of literary traditions, it is J.M. Coetzee. A comprehensive appreciation of his literary production will very much depend upon familiarity with literary works such as Robinson Crusoe (1719), Devils (1871) or Don Quixote (1605, 1615). Vice versa, our reading of Defoe, Kafka, Dostoevsky, Beckett or Cervantes will not be the same after having read the South African Nobel Prize-winner's works. Coetzee has turned to Eliot in the attempt to define the ways in which he has been spoken to by European writers and artists. He did so in 'What is a Classic?' , originally a 1991 lecture given in Graz, Austria that, according to Coetzee's biographer John Kannemeyer, 'was to prove one of the most important lectures of his career' (Kannemeyer, 2012: 498). In this lecture, Coetzee analyses T.S. Eliot's eponymous 1944 lecture, exploring the modernist poet's motives for claiming a place within a great Western European tradition beginning with Virgil. According to Coetzee, there are two possible ways of approaching enterprises such as Eliot's: 'the transcendental-poetic and the socio-cultural' (Coetzee, 2002: 9). In the first case, the approach to the classic is presented as an 'impersonal aesthetic experience'; in the second, it is an experience marked by 'material interest' (11). Coetzee then goes on to present himself as an example analogous to Eliot's of the way 'provincials' or 'colonials' may situate themselves in relation to 'the high culture of the metropolis' (7). He analyses 'the impact of the classic' (10, italics in original), which he first experienced when he listened to Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier in the South Africa of 1955, wondering whether this experience was a transcendental aesthetic one or whether it was determined by material interests: [I]s there some non-vacuous sense in which I can say that the spirit of Bach was speaking to me across the ages, across the seas, putting before me certain ideals; or was what was really going on at that moment that I was symbolically electing high European culture, and command of

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The article argues that Coetzee’s novel Disgrace positions the animal not only as opposed to protagonist David Lurie but also in him. The novel dramatizes this by focusing on Eros: Lurie gradually replaces his idea of desire derived from the Romantics (Wordsworth, Coleridge) with an idea of instinct that suggests Eros to be common to humans and animals. I argue that Lurie ultimately arrives at a stance similar to that of Diogenes of Sinope, the contemporary of Plato and main representative of the Cynics. Seen against this background, Lurie’s metamorphosis into a ‘dog-man’ becomes readable as recognition of his own animality, a recognition that has decisive consequences for an ethical reading of the novel.