The post-humanities novel

Both Coetzee's Disgrace and Allen Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty can be described as post-humanities novels in that both are about men whose identifications with canonical literary figures (Byron, Henry James) are not simply impractictible and idealist but expose them the more to a debased society. At the level of content, Coetzee is less bleak than Hollinghurst, since his hero David Lurie continues to dabble with his opera about Byron, even if only to express his sense of literary heroicism's failure. But Henry James offers nothing at all to Hollinghurst's hero Nick Guest who has thoroughly prostituted himself to the Thatcherites and is probably about to die. At the level of style it is rather different: Hollinghurst's prose is literary in a mode which includes James in its genealogy while Coetzee writes bare sentences which act out the literary heritage's irrelevance to post-apartheid South Africa.
Of course the concept of the post-humanities art novel, especially one that is evaluating contemporary society as debased, is paradoxical. And it's the paradox of a literature after literature from which they seem to draw their (literary) power.