188 Materiality and the Modern Cosmopolitan Novel
scenes in Waiting for the Barbarians , or during the attack on Lurie
and his daughter in Disgrace. In fact, a surprising formal disparity
between Coetzee and the other two authors discussed is that the
former’s methods of defamiliarization do not involve “silencing” the
chief protagonists, but quite the opposite. Unlike Phillips and Roth,
Coetzee estranges the readers from his characters by offering the
former more emotional detail than they would comfortably want
to read. As I demonstrate, the torture sequences in Waiting for the
Barbarians are conveyed in an unsettling tone of self-deprecation
and an almost contemptuous desire for excessive disclosure. A simi-
lar tone and mode of description is used in the narrative of Disgrace ,
with the third-person narrator channeling Lurie’s uncannily loqua-
cious and self-mocking stream of thoughts that relate the brutal
attack on his daughter’s farm.
In addition to the recurrence of defamiliarization in all the nov-
els, they each also evoke themes and ideas that complement a mate-
rial framework. The application of this framework constitutes a new
development in the field of cosmopolitan thought. Of course, it
should be noted that there have been cosmopolitan scholars who, in
their formulations, have stressed the necessity of material awareness:
Bryan Turner explicitly contends that material equality is crucial in
cosmopolitan practice because it is needed to ensure mutual recog-
nition and respect.^2 David Harvey also integrates cosmopolitanism
within a material framework when he argues (as is mentioned in
the first chapter) for a need for egalitarian spaces of cosmopolitan
assembly and “hope.”^3 However, at the time of writing, there do
not yet appear to have been any asserted attempts to articulate cos-
mopolitanism with materiality on such a scale as I have attempted
in this book, encompassing the aesthetic, ethical, and sociopoliti-
cal realms associated with the field and then applying this material
framework of cosmopolitanism to works of contemporary literature.
I shall now briefly summarize how this framework was applied in
each chapter.
In the case of Phillips, this approach involved noting a comple-
mentarity with Pierre Macherey’s materialist conception of subjec-
tivity. After demonstrating that the writer promotes a self-reflexive
empathy that is attentive to the influences of history, I then argued