Stefano Evangelista introduces the Cosmopolis & Beyond conference.
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“Guide to a Disturbed Planet”: Modernist travel and the Cosmopolitics of Hospitality in Rebecca West
Annabel Williams explores the notion of hospitality in British modernist travel literature through the work of Rebecca West. This paper explores the notion of hospitality in British modernist travel literature, and argues for its significance to the period in initiating a cosmopolitics that paradoxically both challenges and capitulates to nationalist thinking, and to the privileged status that comes with a universalist cosmopolitan perspective. It uses the work of Rebecca West to demonstrate how moments of embodied and textual hospitality in literary modernism complicate the imperial imaginary of interwar Britain and contribute to a more cosmopolitan outlook, even as the text continues to promote nationalist thinking.
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Cosmopolitan Bodies and choral Anxieties in early twentieth-century Performances of Greek Drama
Fiona Macintosh examines the anxieties in pre-WW1 Britain surrounding social and theatrical, and especially Greek-inspired, dance, which becomes increasingly associated with moral decadence and dangerous 'cosmopolitanism'. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the meaning of drama was no longer deemed to reside exclusively in the word but in a ‘rhythm’ that encompassed word, body, set and score. With this new fascination with the moving body in performance spaces came a widespread interest in the singing, dancing chorus of antiquity, and especially the singing, dancing chorus of Greek tragedy. However, this new corporeality in the British theatre became increasingly associated with moral decadence and above all dangerous ‘cosmopolitanism’, once anti-German feeling became endemic as hostilities within Europe became an increasing likelihood.
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Queer Cosmopolitanism in the Expatriate Literature of Berlin
Ben Robbins considers queer cosmopolitanism in the work of Anglophone writers who lived in Berlin during the era of the Weimar Republic. This paper analyses a selection of Anglophone literature set in Weimar Berlin by the American and British writers Robert McAlmon, W. H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, John Lehmann, and Stephen Spender. Not only were these writers themselves queer expatriates in Berlin during the 1920s and early 1930s, but they produced narratives of queer expatriation. I argue that these texts should be treated as a common literature that collectively explores a form of ‘queer cosmopolitanism’ in which sexual minorities disconnect from primary national identifications in order to form new international communities of belonging. As such, within this literature traditional definitions of the cosmopolitan are reformulated and resignified to accommodate the experience of oppressed minorities, whose transnational movements are catalysed under great social pressure.
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21st-Century Literary Cosmopolitanism: Jean-Philippe Toussaint’s Global Village
Arcana Albright examines the cosmopolitan dimension of contemporary Belgian author Jean-Philippe Toussaint’s oeuvre, in particular his literary website. In multiple ways, contemporary Belgian author Jean-Philippe Toussaint’s works constitute a meditation on the cosmopolitan ideal in the 21st century. In particular, Toussaint’s literary website represents an intriguing case study of intercultural collaboration in the digital age, with its focus on foreign correspondents, the collective work of translation, and the Borges Project, a compilation of short stories written by over fifty authors from a variety of countries and in several languages.
About Cosmopolis and Beyond: Literary Cosmopolitanism after the Republic of Letters
Cosmopolitanism, derived from the ancient Greek for ‘world citizenship’, offers a radical alternative to nationalism, asking individuals to imagine themselves as part of a community that goes beyond national and linguistic boundaries. Recent years have seen an explosion of interest in cosmopolitanism in the humanities and social sciences, especially within philosophy, sociology and politics. Cosmopolitanism, however, has also exercised a shaping influence on modern literary culture. It is well known that during the Enlightenment it found an embodiment in the Republic of Letters. Its evolution thereafter included uneasy alliances with the idea of Empire in the nineteenth century, and with the experiments of the international avant gardes and modernist circles, and the phenomenon of globalisation in the twentieth. Through these, and more, cultural formations cosmopolitanism has given rise to new ways of writing, reading, translating and circulating texts; these processes have, in turn, led to new understandings of individual and national identity, new forms of ethics and new configurations of aesthetic and political engagement. From Kant to Derrida, cosmopolitanism has in the course of history been seen as fostering peace and communication across borders. Far from being uncontroversial, though, it has also been attacked by those who have denounced its universalism as impossible and its social ethos as elitist.
The papers gathered here were delivered at the conference Cosmopolis and Beyond, which was held at Trinity College, Oxford, in March 2016. The keynote addresses were given by Emily Apter (NYU) and Gisèle Sapiro (EHESS). The individual papers explore different literary manifestations of the cosmopolitan ideal, broadly conceived, and its influence on modern literary culture. They tease out elements of continuity and rupture in a long history of literary cosmopolitanism that goes from the decline of the Republic of Letters to the era of globalisation.
The conference was part of the AHRC-funded research project 'The Love of Strangers: Literary Cosmopolitanism in the English Fin de Siècle', led by Stefano Evangelista.
It was organised by Stefano Evangelista (conference organiser) and Clément Dessy (conference assistant).
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South Africa