Cosmopolis and Beyond: Literary Cosmopolitanism after the Republic of Letters

By Oxford UniversityEducation

Cosmopolis and Beyond: Literary Cosmopolitanism after the Republic of Letters episodes

April 05, 2016 'Intellectual cosmopolitanism affirms itself in the land': Hermes and the Basque-English Network of the 1920s
Leire Barrera-Medrano explores the Basque-English Modernist network surrounding the journal 'Hermes' which represents a prominent example of the connection between cosmopolitan localism, nationalist politics and modernist aesthetics. In 1917 the Basque nationalist intelligentsia founded the cultural journal 'Hermes' with the intention to integrate nationalism and universal modern ideas. With the intention to construct a modern image of the industrial Basque Country, 'Hermes' endorsed a pro-European ideal and looked to England for contributors, based on a perceived kindred culture: a combination of popular tradition and industrialisation. As a result, the journal published translated and original works of what they viewed as the most progressive writers in English, including Arthur Symons and Ezra Pound, alongside all the major figures of Basque and Spanish Modernism.
23 min
April 05, 2016 Defamiliarizing India: Cosmopolitanism as a condition of aesthetic and political Survival
Laetitia Zecchini discusses the cosmopolitanism of several post-independence Indian poets and artists. Indian poets and artists situated in specific spaces, such as Arun Kolatkar, from Bombay, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, from Allahabad or Gulammohammed Sheikh from Baroda fashion a cosmopolitanism that must be envisaged as a context of creation, as a practice of writing, reading, translating and creating, and as a project. This project is inseparable from a poetics of 'reworlding' or defamiliarization, from the experience and defense of plurality, and from the 'resilient and inventive strategies for survival' Clifford associates with the notion of discrepant cosmopolitanism.
22 min
April 05, 2016 Cosmopolitanism and Empire
Elleke Boehmer considers the cosmopolitan outlooks, experiences and values of Indian travellers to the west in the late 19th century. In the late 19th c a set of remarkable Indian ‘arrivants’ – scholars, poets, religious seekers, and political activists – began, as novelist Amitav Ghosh describes it, 'travelling in the west'. They included Toru Dutt and Sarojini Naidu, Mohandas Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore. In this paper I examine how their travel to and presence on British shores and involvement with various Britons had a shaping effect on how cosmopolitan life in the imperial capital was conceived, and, therefore, on how intercultural hospitality was expressed – especially at a time, as we remember, of high imperialism, and of outright racism especially in the imperial frontier.
17 min
April 05, 2016 Who are (or were) the Cosmopolitans? Thoughts from multilingual India
Who are (or were) the Cosmopolitans? Thoughts from multilingual India
21 min
April 05, 2016 Daily Rhythms, urban Rhythms: City Films of the 1920s
Daily Rhythms, urban Rhythms: City Films of the 1920s
25 min
April 05, 2016 Cosmopolitanism and Provincialism: Distant Intimacy and the Transatlantic Village Tale
Josephine McDonagh shows under what circumstances the provincial may also be cosmopolitan by analysing Mary Russell Mitford's work and the case of the village tale. From Three Mile Cross, Mitford’s village home, across the Atlantic to Boston and beyond, Mitford’s village tales could be said to go global. This paper examines the way in which the village tale provides a set of terms and an imagined space through with circles of writers and literary people in different countries collectively conceived a transatlantic literary world. It considers the implications of this and of the instability of the distinctions between the terms provincial and cosmopolitan, and the legacies of this in the mid-nineteenth-century shaping of national literary traditions.
23 min
April 05, 2016 Virginia Woolf’s French Cloak, or, To the Lighthouse previews in Paris
Caroline Patey analyses the strange anecdote of Virginia Woolf's first ever translation in French and the effect it had on her French reception. In 1926, 'Commerce' published a translation of 'Time Passes'/'Le temps passe' before the novel was even out in Great Britain and in English. Subsequent research has shown that the translator - Charles Mauron - was working on a version different from both holograph version and printed text. What is thus the status of the 'third' text? Did the choice of Commerce inflect Woolf's image in France? And above all how did Mauron's version contribute to her literary image in the hexagon?
29 min
April 05, 2016 Brussels fin de siècle between Paris and London
Clément Dessy examines the Anglophilia of literary and artistic symbolist groups in Brussels. Between 1880 and 1930, Belgium and Brussels began to be perceived as places where cosmopolitanism could take root. This paper analyses the Anglophile attitude of Belgian literary and artistic avant-gardes. Belgian symbolists targeted both Paris and London in order to lift Brussels from its status of a second-level cultural capital to the level of the French and British metropoles.
24 min
April 05, 2016 Translational Equaliberty: Language as Cosmopolitan Right in the Europe of Migrations (Keynote address)
Emily Apter speaks about the right to a cosmopolitan citizenship, showing how questions of language and translation have acquired political urgency in the context of the global refugee crisis. Emily Apter discusses cosmopolitanism in relation to migration and the concept of linguistic citizenship. She explores the translation zone of the transit camp and detention centre, the status of the strait as middle passage of political peril, and the politics of translational triage and the accent test. Apter approaches the refugee crisis as a condition that produces new unfreedoms of speech and forms of translational injustice.
1 hr 9 min

About Cosmopolis and Beyond: Literary Cosmopolitanism after the Republic of Letters

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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.