Sympathy and cosmopolitanism

pp. 21-41

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

Abstract

Does reading literature enhance the sympathetic imagination? If so, might the study of literature foster a cosmopolitan practice that establishes equitable relations premised on mutual sympathy? These questions may easily be decried as naïvely and sentimentally utopian. They may be decried as naïve because they envision diverse readerships that are homogenously affected by a course of literary study. They may be decried as sentimental because they suggest a correlation between sympathy and equality. Yet contemporary cosmopolitan thinkers have repeatedly affirmed the potential of reading literature for the development of the sympathetic imagination and the increased capacity to feel for other human beings, howsoever distant and different. Such affirmations foreground both a desire for a universal human sympathy and a faith in the humane effects of sympathy persisting within contemporary cosmopolitan theory, even though contemporary cosmopolitan discourse actively refutes accusations of naïveté and sentimentality. This chapter and the two following endeavor to articulate the ways in which discrete understandings of sympathy come to dictate and reify cosmopolitan practices.