ABSTRACTS

World Literature and Cosmopolitanism: "Citizen of the World" without the Citizen?

Deborah Jenson
(Duke University)

The recent resurgence of cosmopolitanism as a "edge issue" in the 2008 U.S. presidential election following Barack Obama's reference to "citizen of the world" (1 occurrence), "people of the world" (6 occurrences), and "world" tout court (30 occurrences) in his Berlin speech, is a reminder that cosmopolitanism is a powerful precedent for any "world" philosophy, whether related to law, politics, economy, or letters. The construct of "World Literature" in the French-speaking world, despite its corrective relationship to the construct of francophonie, is arguably also an updating of the cosmopolitical paradigm, positioning literature with regard to a transregional polis in which the citizen--as the counterpoint to the slave--is not the key political emblem of the human in the world. I will explore claims for "World Literature" through their parallelism and contrast with a moment in which cosmopolitanism was seen to be transformed through the new and in some ways paradoxical citizenship, or the non-citizenship, of groups conquered in the Roman Empire: decadence. In Montesquieu's text on the causes of Roman decadence, and in the 19th century "Salomé" texts by Wilde and Flaubert with their evocation of Roman decadence, we see a post-cosmopolitan multi-cultural confluence of group cultural actors in an imperialized world. This collapse of cosmopolitanism into diasporan or migrant agency is, I will argue, an especially meaningful precedent for World Literature in the francophone context.