J. M. Coetzee and the Limits of Cosmopolitanism by Katherine Hallemeier (review)

Abstract

Katherine Hallemeier.J. M. Coetzee and the Limits of Cosmopolitanism. New York: Palgrave, 2013. Pp. 201. US$90. Well-known for his preoccupation with ethical questions about responsibility to and interaction with others, J. M. Coetzee offers one of the most intriguing archives for critics of to consider. Katherine Hallemeier's J. M. Coetzee and the Limits of Cosmopolitanism, focused on his recent fiction (beginning with 2007's Boyhood), provides a thorough examination of Coetzee's engagement with a variety of forms of Hallemeier offers a persuasive argument for reading Coetzee's later fiction as interventions into contemporary debates about the nature of and, particularly, its ethical implications. The book begins by outlining two ways of categorizing current theorizations of and their links to sympathy: rational cosmopolitanism and cosmopolitanism. The first posits sympathy supplements reason while the second imagines that sympathy is extrarational (16). Both are similar insofar as they a perfect human sympathy that is never interrupted by the of misunderstanding or inequality (17). In her examination of and its enactment in Coetzees fiction, Hallemeier notes that Coetzee critiques these models through a suggestion that paranoia can undergird the privileging of rationality while an emphasis on the affective can uncritically reinforce gender stereotypes. Hallemeier goes on to identify another strand of cosmopolitan thinking in which might offer a useful interruption of vision of sympathy [as] dramatically by envision [ing] a that admits to the possibility of experiencing the self-as-other (97-98). Yet as Hallemeier illustrates through Coetzee's exploration of the limited cosmopolitan potential of shame (100), is not without its similarly utopian aspirations for emotion and its ethical potential. This analysis of the role of sympathy and in current cosmopolitan theory (roughly the first three quarters of the book) offers a thorough overview of the field and its variety of approaches to both affect and universality. For those who are new to this body of theory or those who would appreciate an outline of many of the key approaches to cosmopolitanism, this part of the book will prove very helpful. At the same time, Hallemeier demonstrates how fiction might provide a useful additional voice in the critical debates surrounding the forms cosmopolitan practice might take, experiment[ing] with the possibility that thinking through an idea across different genres enables conversations that are incommensurable [approached differently but with shared priorities] yet complementary (16). …