14 Materiality and the Modern Cosmopolitan Novel
understanding history and its relation to human existence, but that
nevertheless encourage historical consciousness.
However, I should also stress here that I regard the material-
ist methodology employed in this book to be—at least in funda-
mental ways—compatible with the materialism observed by Marx,
Raymond Williams, Pierre Macherey, Benita Parry, and numerous
other sociopolitical and cultural theorists (I demonstrate this most
conspicuously in the third chapter, which looks at Philip Roth’s
American Trilogy). Although I do not reduce my materialist frame-
work to a sociopolitical agenda, I still consider that it is entirely
capable of being applied to the most materialistically rigorous of
sociopolitical schemas. In a sense, then, this book could be seen to
respond to Benita Parry’s comments that contemporary theorists
should engage “critically with the current usage of cosmopolitanism
where it is drained of any political connotations.”^44 I therefore sub-
mit that, although Parry’s sociopolitical theories are of great value
to cosmopolitan thought, her words suggest a limited appreciation
of the broad and eclectic theoretical terrain. As substantiated above,
cosmopolitanism is simply not the kind of theoretical model that
can be thoroughly politicized. This is not least because there are
areas of aesthetic priority within the field, whose structures would
crumble to dust if used for political purposes.
OVERVIEW OF THE CHAPTERS
The book is divided into three chapters, each of which focuses
primarily on three novels written by Phillips, Coetzee, and Roth
respectively. In the opening chapter I argue that in novels such as
Higher Ground, The Nature of Blood, and A Distant Shore, Phillips
provokes the reader into adopting a critical cosmopolitan vision that
is sensitive to the material influences of history but simultaneously
looks beyond particularity in pursuit of a more universal concep-
tion of human subjectivity. In both Higher Ground and The Nature
of Blood , voices from different historical periods relate a number of
stories with shared themes of exile and deracination. I explore how
Phillips articulates a relationship between each of these voices and
the respective historical situations they inhabit. I then contend that