Cosmopolis and Beyond: Literary Cosmopolitanism after the Republic of Letters Oxford University

Stefano Evangelista introduces the Cosmopolis & Beyond conference.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Galin Tihanov seeks to locate the Anglo-Saxon discourse of ‘world literature’ vis-à-vis three major reference points: time, space, and language, and to examine the potential of literature to construct its own images of 'world literature'. Galin Tihanov seeks to locate the Anglo-Saxon discourse of ‘world literature’ vis-à-vis three major reference points: time, space, and language, and to examine the potential of literature to generate its own images of 'world literature', including those facilitating a skeptical or ironic meta-reflection. In the first part, the paper offers a chronotopic analysis of ‘world literature’ as a construct, while the second part analyses a key 1930s novel in order to gauge the potential of literature to reflect on itself as 'world literature'.