Epilogue 187some of the cultural and sociopolitical issues that impede cosmo-
politan conciliation in the American context. This distinction
between Phillips and Roth’s use of silence is worth underscoring
here, because it presents a colorful illustration of the degree to which
literary form has been used at a meta-textual level to advance cos-
mopolitan ideas.
This formal disparity highlights another important but broader
difference between the two writers. I found that, unlike Phillips’s,
Roth’s employment of silence prompts a critical response from the
reader that is more politically and socioeconomically urgent, partic-
ularly in the case of American Pastoral. Through provocative silence,
the author encourages a critical view of neoliberal capitalism, espe-
cially in the American setting. Roth therefore appears to use the
American regional setting to explore larger international and cos-
mopolitan issues. In this sense, Roth’s could be characterized as a
vision of cosmopolitanism that might be achieved within, and per-
haps “in spite of,” the peculiar socioeconomic and cultural history
of America. While Phillips also brings the regional into focus in A
Distant Shore , he does not present strong connections between the
contingent historical circumstances peculiar to Britain and the cos-
mopolitan possibilities of his protagonists, at least not to the same
extent or in the same manner as Roth does in the American Trilogy.
Another difference that can be observed is that in Roth’s case, nar-
rative silence has the important additional function of integrating
the characters within the well-established literary structure of trag-
edy. This conspicuous display of artifice reminds the reader that
any attempt to account for the lives of human beings, particularly
through the medium of the novel, will inevitably be selective, biased,
and distorted.
In the chapter examining Coetzee, I illustrated that defamiliar-
ization is also used to promote a critical cosmopolitan vision and to
generate a self-reflexive empathic response. However, Coetzee’s defa-
miliarization does not reach the proportions exhibited in Phillips’s
The Nature of Blood , which involves a deliberate strategy to create a
sense of moral and epistemic uncertainty surrounding the charac-
ters. Rather, in Coetzee’s case, defamiliarization is used in a limited
capacity, but at strategic moments, such as the Magistrate’s torture