The Cambridge Companion to World Literature

Abstract

TIMOTHY BRENNANCosmopolitanism and World Literature Simply to entertain the idea of world literature is already to be cosmopolitan, it would seem. How else might global humanity find itself on the same page, except by adopting cosmopolitanism's openness to difference? As soon as the view implicit in this question is accepted, the totality of literature becomes a kind of family romance: national bigotries and taste preferencesplaguing relations between countries in other areasare overcome when writers around the world have more in common with each other than with their own compatriots, and speak the lingua franca of the imagination.But this is only how it seems, for cosmopolitanism in history is far from straightforward. In Greek antiquity, the notion of cosmopolis was more about absorbing other nations than understanding them. The idea became pronounced in the wake of Alexander's conquests, when Stoic philosophers sought to knit together the natural and social orders, thereby giving divine sanction to the Greek nobility of mind as it was being spread on a spear-point to the 'barbarian' world. Take a second historical example: the great interwar Italian theorist Antonio Gramsci, a revolutionary who studied philology at the University of Turin, saw cosmopolitanism as the natural outlook of a centralizing and incorporative Catholic Church. He pointed out that in the early centuries of the first millennium, the Church had stepped into the shoes of the Roman Empire by taking over its role of disarticulating local cultures and languages across Europe in the name of an 'imperial-universal' based on the authority of Rome and the (now hieratic) language of Latin.The remarkable late-eighteenth-century philosopher of language, cognition, and world history, Johann Gottfried Herder, was equally hesitant. 'Universal love for humanity, for all nations, and even enemies' too often goes hand-in-hand, he observed, with repression at home. 1 He saw cosmopolitanism as a 'pretext for exporting one's own values abroad or a justification for slavishly imitating other nations at the cost of one's freedom and independence'. 2 In the end, he thought, the position was hypocritical. As a call to arms, cosmopolitanism suspiciously surged into academic 23