Developing Cosmopolitan Action Scripts with Camus’s “The Guest” and Coetzee’s Disgrace PDF Free Download
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Developing Cosmopolitan
Action Scripts with
Camus’s “e Guest” and
Coetzee’s Disgrace
Abstract: oroughgoing cosmopolitanism includes
taking action, and in order to act on their compassion for
the Other, individuals must possess plans or scripts for
meeting the Other’s needs. Literary study can promote
the development of and investment in such scripts. is
chapter explains how teachers can employ “e Guest”
to help students develop a script of global hospitality that
involves providing for needy Others everywhere even at
some cost to oneself, and how Disgrace can be taught in a
manner that develops the most dicult and thoroughgoing
of cosmopolitan action scripts, that of sacricing one’s
own wealth, power, security—and perhaps even one’s very
being, identity, self-integrity—for the benet of needy
Others whose beliefs, values, and behaviors one may nd
antithetical to one’s own.
Mark Bracher. Educating for Cosmopolitanism: Lessons
from Cognitive Science and Literature. New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, . : ./.
M. Bracher, Educating for Cosmopolitanism: Lessons from Cognitive Science and Literature
© Mark Bracher 2013
: ./
Developing Cosmopolitan Action Scripts
Compassion for distant Others may be a crucial element of cosmopoli-
tanism, but it is not by itself sucient to produce the advancements in
global justice that constitute the central purpose of cosmopolitanism.
True cosmopolitanism involves not just having feelings of sympathy or
altruistic inclinations regarding the Other; it also involves taking eec-
tive action to advance global justice. And for people to take such action,
they must be cognizant of a viable path leading from here to there:
studies have shown that awareness of a feasible means of helping people
one desires to help is a prerequisite for altruistic action (see Ross and
Nisbett). True cosmopolitans must thus possess an action script, a plan
for a course of action that will advance global justice.
People develop action scripts by rehearsing them in various ways,
including observing—or reading about—other people taking a particu-
lar action, and also by engaging in the action themselves, or imagining
doing so.
Literary study can help to develop action scripts by engaging
students in rehearsing them in several of these ways, including reading
about them, discussing them, and writing about them. And literary
study can develop cosmopolitan action scripts by nurturing the four
corrective general person-schemas and then linking the understanding
of, and compassion for, the Other that these schemas produce to action
scripts of helping distant strangers and promoting global justice. In what
follows, I will explain how this process can be implemented through
teaching Camus’s “e Guest” and Coetzee’s
Disgrace
.
Cosmopolitanism as hospitality: “e Guest”
Camus’s short story “e Guest” oers teachers an opportunity to
enhance their students’ capabilities of discerning the four key features
of human existence in distant Others and linking the compassion that
such discernment generates to the basic cosmopolitan action script of
hospitality: providing food, drink, shelter, and other necessities for
people in need throughout the world. e story also engages the readers
in an imaginative rehearsal of this script in a concrete and rudimentary
form. Its basic plot consists of the French schoolmaster Daru’s feeding,
providing for, and setting free the Arab prisoner that the authorities have
tasked him with delivering to another jail. Along the way, the text also
exemplies the four key features of human existence the recognition of
