Cosmopolitanism and Literary Form

Abstract

This essay examines recent work on cosmopolitanism in literary studies, with a focus on questions of form. Starting with the emergence of the ‘new cosmopolitanisms’ in the 1990s, I look at the controversies that have beset the term and show how these are related to its multiple meanings. I then turn to cosmopolitanism’s impact on the field of literary studies and argue that analyses of cosmopolitan literature that employ formalist as well as historical and political methodologies might redress the ideological impasse between recuperative and skeptical views of cosmopolitanism by showing how individual versions of it have taken shape over time. It is through the particulars of language and genre, I argue, that cosmopolitan texts seek to qualify the universalisms that they espouse and ground themselves in the textures of difference.