Introduction

pp. 1-19

in: Katherine Hallemeier, J. M. Coetzee and the limits of cosmopolitanism, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013

Abstract

At an academic luncheon in J. M. Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello (2003), a young scholar offers an impassioned defense of his discipline: ""[I]t is the humanities and the humanities alone, and the training that the humanities provide, that will allow us to steer our way through this new multicultural world" (129). The humanities, the scholar maintains, provide a means of conceiving a singular human history that yet encompasses "hundreds of other cultures, each with its own language and history and mythology and unique way of seeing the world" (129). The humanities, in other words, afford an opportunity to apprehend "humanity" in all its constitutive varieties.