Mapping the Boundaries: J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace and Slow Man as Modern Cosmopolitan Fiction

Abstract

The paper aims to investigate J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace and Slow Man in terms of cosmopolitan concepts of shame, imaginative sympathy and its limits. Coetzee’s novels encourage a ‘distinctive individualism’ which reflects the insufficiency of shame, guilt and sympathy as indicative of cosmopolitan philosophy. In this regard, a selective theoretical approach is adopted, which suggest that Coetzee’s fiction is significant and promotes a faith-driven association between the cosmopolitan subject and the ‘other’. The presence of others in his novels makes it cosmopolitan, even though the central subject often gets humiliated and excluded by the ‘other’. The subject’s shame in both the novels makes them experience isolation and their problematic association with the other, which has a flagged presence in Coetzee’s prose. The present paper attempts to argue that both the novels end on a different note proving that cosmopolitanism has different facets- positive as well as negative and also challenges Coetzee’s readers to identify their cosmopolitan limits.