Katherine Hallemeier

author of "J.M. Coetzee and the Limits of Cosmopolitanism"

February 4, 2014

Katherine Hallemeier is assistant professor of postcolonial Anglophone literature in the English Department at Oklahoma State University. She has published articles on South African literature, the ethics of reading, and cosmopolitanism in journals such as Scrutiny2; Culture, Theory and Critique; Proteus; and in the edited collection Postcolonial Audiences. Her monograph, "J.M. Coetzee and the Limits of Cosmopolitanism," was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2013. An article on cosmopolitanism in the work of Teju Cole is forthcoming in ARIEL. Her current research interests include models of international literary relations and representations of the United States in African fiction.

"J.M. Coetzee and the Limits of Cosmopolitanism" examines the representation and enactment of cosmopolitan feeling in the later fiction of Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee. Coetzee has long been characterized as a 'cosmopolitan' author. His novels have been upheld as forwarding the cosmopolitan goals of equality and mutuality, either by extending sympathy to a distant humanity, or by foregrounding existent transnational bonds. In contrast to these views, the book proposes that Coetzee raises the unsettling possibility that feelings such as sympathy undermine cosmopolitan goals of equality and mutuality. His later novels challenge the supposition that cosmopolitanism requires the propagation of openness to others, or the proliferation of multiple attachments. They suggest that relationships of equality and mutuality might paradoxically require a readiness to leave others alone. The book offers original contributions to the expanding fields of cosmopolitan studies and Coetzee studies. Even though cosmopolitan scholarship frequently invokes the importance of feeling and deploys affective terms, it rarely, if ever, analyzes what feeling is. This monograph draws on current theories of affect in order to dispute tendencies within cosmopolitan scholarship to moralize and naturalize particular feelings as 'human.' In the process, it stands as the first book-length study that reads Coetzee in light of cosmopolitan thought.

URL: https://library.okstate.edu/news/celebratingbooks/2014-honorees/katherine-hallemeier

Last Updated: 12 January 2022