Cosmopolis and Beyond: Literary Cosmopolitanism after the Republic of Letters

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'.

Julien Schuh examines the circulation of styles and ideas through periodicals in Europe at the turn of the twentieth century. This paper analyses the conditions that allowed the birth of a culture of virality in the European press at the end the of nineteenth century through a specific style, 'Synthetism', which relied on abstraction and deformation. This style developed at the same time in the modernist magazines and in the periodicals of mass consumption.

Nagihan Haliloğlu posits Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar as a pioneer of literary cosmopolitanism in Turkey, considering his lectures on literature, given in 1950’s at the Turkish Literature department, Istanbul University. This paper aims to posit Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar as a pioneer of literary cosmopolitanism in Turkey, considering his Lectures on Literature, collection of lectures given in 1950’s at the Turkish Literature department, Istanbul University. The lectures reveal a literary cosmopolitanism that combines an understanding of literary, architectural and musical patterns that travel across borders. As such, Tanpınar’s lectures can be seen a vademecum for the comparative literature student interested in considering European and Turkish literatures together. Tanpınar’s work and enduring influence on Turkish writers such as Orhan Pamuk is further proof that only through a good knowledge of local tradition are literary cosmopolitanism and comparative literary studies possible.

Guillaume Bridet assesses how Nationalism, Cosmopolitanism and Internationalism interact and differ in the French literary context during the interwar period. Between the two world wars, a troubled period that constitutes a crisis of civilisation, Nationalism, Cosmopolitanism and Internationalism are present at the same time in literary and intellectual French life. On one hand national writers as Maurice Barrès think that France can regenerate itself only by remaining faithful to the mainly rural and catholical culture of its people. On the other hand Cosmopolitan and Internationalist writers have both Nationalism as enemy. They indeed have in common the idea that national scale in not relevant to understand what is happening in Europe and in the world. But their goals are different. Whereas Cosmopolitanism connects every individual to the others by a common membership in Cosmos and infers that laws or habits of every country can be criticized in the name of superior values, Internationalism connects workers on the basis of their membership in lower classes and tries to arouse solidarities beyond national borders. This dialectic between Nationalism, Cosmopolitanism and Internationalism enables to reconsider the French literary and intellectual life between the two world wars, but also the role that literature can play in today's globalisation.

Francesca Billiani discusses cosmopolitism as practiced by the Italian cultural elites under the Fascist regime. During the Italian Fascist rule, Modernist literary and cultural journals engendered productive aesthetic debates about the role the arts had to play in relation to the political and cultural doctrine of the totalitarian state. In this respect, cosmopolitanism was a central concern for the Italian elites, since it allowed them to resist the totalitarian and universalistic politics of the regime while continuing to engage with European debates and inscribed them into the Fascist system of the arts.

Isabelle Richet analyses two English-language periodicals published by British expatriates in Florence in the 19th century. The large British expatriate community that settled in Florence in the second half of the 19th century engaged in many intellectual endeavours to promote Italian culture. This paper looks at two English-language periodicals, 'The Tuscan Athenaeum', edited by Theodosia Garrow Trollope in1848-1849 and 'The Florence Gazette', edited by Helen Zimmern from 1890 to 1915. It analyses the extensive transnational networks the two editors belonged to and the way these periodicals contributed to the development of a cosmopolitan 'imagined community'.

Stéphanie Prévost discusses what publishing an Armenian periodical in Paris & London, in another language than Armenian meant for the construction of an Armenian identity at the time of the national awakening (Zartonk). Paris & London have often been regarded as cosmopolitan cities, especially at the turn of the 20th century. This paper reflects on the decision of the Armenian Patriotic Committee and of Minas Tchéraz, a member of the Armenian delegation to the 1878 Congress of Berlin, to launch Armenian periodicals in those two cities, in languages other than Armenian. Respecticely, 'The Haïasdan' (1888-1892) was bilingual, English-Armenian, including after it was taken over by the Anglo-Armenian Association in 1891; and Tchéraz published 'Armenia' (1890-1898), an English version of 'L'Arménie' (1889-1905) in which the resort to the Armenian language was minimal in both and even inexistant before 1891. What impact then did language choice have on the construction of an Armenian identity, especially on its scope (national, diasporic or cosmopolitan) and vis-à-vis its targeted readership?

Alessandra Marchi examines the italian political press in Alexandria (Egypt), mainly at the beginning of the XX century. The Alexandrian cosmopolitanism can be studied through the prism of the Italian community and its representation in the national press circulating in Egypt, to illustrate some crucial interconnections between the press, literature, and political ideas, emerging from the work of some Italian-Alexandrian writers like Enrico Pea, Giuseppe Ungaretti, or Enrico Insabato and Leda Rafanelli. The aim of this paper is to show how the study of the Italian press of Egypt is fundamental to investigate the history of the relations between the two sides of the Mediterranean.

Valentina Gosetti gives the first presentation in the seventh panel; Cosmopolitan Literary Exchange in the Transnational Press.

Sarah Parker focuses on the love affair between the Decadent poets Olive Custance and Renée Vivien and the American writer Natalie Barney, arguing that affecting ‘Frenchness’ and writing in French allowed them to articulate their desire for one another. This paper focuses on the literary productions inspired by the love affair between the Decadent poets Olive Custance, Renée Vivien (née Pauline Tarn), and the American writer Natalie Barney. It draws primarily on Vivien’s roman à clef 'Une Femme m’apparut' (A Woman Appeared to Me, 1904) along with Custance and Barney’s poetry. In analysing these texts, it is concerned primarily with the question: how does Vivien, Barney and Custance’s literary cosmopolitanism (in this case, their writing in – or affection of – ‘Frenchness’) reflect and interact with their expressions of lesbian desire? It also considers to what extent adopting a different language and national identity enabled these women to express a lesbian desire and to envision the possibility of a homoerotic cosmopolitan female community.

Rebecca N. Mitchell discusses the anti-cosmopolitanism of litigious editor and literary gadfly T. W. H. Crosland. Poet, editor, and constant litigant T. W. H. Crosland (1868-1924) grounded claims of moral superiority and sexual propriety in vitriolic nationalism, xenophobia, and homophobia. Yet, as this paper argues, Crosland’s court testimony, published invective, and personal behavior distilled the aesthetic and moral narrowmindedness of anti-cosmopolitanism, ultimately promoting the very values that Crosland ostensibly loathed.

Kristin Mahoney’s paper on Laurence Housman asserts that Housman implemented a Decadent vision of queer desire in his activist work in support of the pacifist and Indian independence movements in the 1930s and 40s. Author and illustrator Laurence Housman began his career as a ‘disciple of the Nineties’, a member of Oscar Wilde’s circle who worked frequently with the Decadent publisher John Lane, but during the twentieth century, he became more well known as a political activist, devoted to the causes of gay rights, peace, and Indian independence. The rhetoric that Housman employed in theorizing pacifism and the resistance to colonialism borrows directly from the conceptualization of promiscuous fellow-feeling in his writing about same-sex desire. This paper traces Housman’s interest in fellow-feeling through the many stages of his career, examining the representation of promiscuous amativeness in Housman’s Decadent fairy tales of the 1890s, the privileging of expansive affiliation in his queer activist writing in the teens, and the emphasis on ‘unity of spirit’ in his pacifist and anticolonial work of the 1930s and 40s, and it considers the centrality of eroticism to Housman’s theory of cosmopolitan community, the manner in which eroticism underwrote his vision of transnational unity.

Gisèle Sapiro traces the emergence of a transnational literary field in the twentieth century by analysing the book market for translations. Sapiro defines the notions of ‘cosmopolitan’, ‘international’, ‘transnational’, ‘global’ and ‘world’ from a historical and sociological point of view in order to show that they should not be understood to be in opposition to the national perspective. She then tackles the emergence of a transnational literary field and its inherent inequalities through the circulation of books and the increasing practices of translation as well as the formation of a World literary canon after the Second World War.

Martina Ciceri explores the cosmopolitan aesthetics of Jaakoff Prelooker’s magazine 'The Anglo-Russian' in Late-Victorian England. At the turn of the 20th century, Russian emigration to Britain fostered cross-cultural encounters, offering an unprecedented opportunity for cosmopolitanism. This paper examines the importance Anglo-Russian exchanges had in Jaakoff Prelooker’s English career. By posing a challenge to hegemonic discourses and traditional narrative, such encounters triggered the negotiation of the cosmopolitan aesthetics of 'The Anglo-Russian' magazine.

Katharina Herold examines the interplay of cosmopolitanism and orientalism in Wilde's poem 'The Sphinx'. Wilde’s Orient is inspired by impressions from his father’s extended travels to the Middle East and North Africa in 1837, literary French influences, his friend Charles Ricketts and not least his own keen interest in ancient archaeology. Looking at images from the Middle East in Wilde’s poem 'The Sphinx' (published 1894), this paper interrogates Wilde’s literary manifestation of this cosmopolitan ideal of appropriation and conglomeration. Does Wilde’s resistance to nationalistic specification qualify as Orientalist because it ignores political implications of engrossing foreign cultural traits and disconnecting them from their history? Or indeed, could we consider Wilde a pioneer of multicultural fusion of national identities that results in celebrating literature as the ideal of aestheticist beauty transcending categories of national origin?

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.

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.

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.

Who are (or were) the Cosmopolitans? Thoughts from multilingual India

Daily Rhythms, urban Rhythms: City Films of the 1920s

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.

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?

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.

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.