Cosmopolitan Perspectives: Globalization and Transnationalization in Contemporary German Literature

Abstract

Literature and Cosmopolitan PerspectiveONE OF THE MOST NOTICEABLE TRENDS in twenty-first-century German-language literature is its reach beyond borders of German-language area. German novels published between years 2000 and 2010 are set all over globe, including such diverse countries as Benin (Dieter Zwicky's Cotonville, 2008), Bulgaria (Sibylle Lewitscharoff s Apostoloff, 2009), Burma (Christiane Neudecker's Nirgendwo sonst, 2008), Italy (Daniel Zahno's Die Geliebte des Ge latiere, 2009), Hungary (Ingo Schulze's Adam und Evelyn, 2008), India (Ulla Lenze's Schwester und Bruder, 2003), Iceland (Kristof Magnusson's Zuhause, 2005), Russia (Katja Huber's Fernwarme, 2005), and USA (Gregor Hens's Transfer Lounge, 2003). By assuming a fully globalized world as their point of departure, many of these texts challenge traditional understandings of travel, exile, and migrant literature, which have in past served as viable tools with which to analyse intercultural literature. Passages through different cultures and languages have become a matter of course.To be sure, connectedness to world is not a new phenomenon. People throughout history have cared about world outside their local purview, travelled and lived abroad, and written about it. What is different today is degree to which individuals and communities are exposed to world as a result of advances in international commerce, transportation, and technology. On lower end of economic spectrum, workers must follow economic opportunities, often covering great geographical, cultural, and linguistic dis- tances. On upper end of economic spectrum, people have freedom to travel, live, or work in distant parts of world. Travel and tourism are no longer activities reserved for an affluent elite, as may have been case fifty or sixty years ago, but have become a mainstay of global middle-class lifestyles.1 The use of information technology currently follows a similar trajectory. Computers, smart phones, and broadband Internet access are becoming increasingly affordable in much of world.2 The combination of firsthand experiences of foreign countries through migration and travel, and secondhand experiences delivered through media, creates a new type of global consciousness that integrates seamlessly with local realities.The globalization theorist Ulrich Beck has described perspective that emerges from these various compressions of space as view. Cosmopolitization, according to Beck, is an integral part of globalization processes. It is an internal globalization, globalization from within national societies, in which issues of global concern are becoming part of [...] everyday local experiences.3 People are, and perceive themselves to be, simultaneously citizens of cosmos and polis, world and nation, and are compelled to negotiate within themselves contradictions that these parallel forms of belonging imply. The central defining characteristic of cosmopolitan perspective is therefore an outlook on world that Beck describes as dialogic imagination, or the clash of cultures and rationalities within one's own life.4Beck's concept of cosmopolitization offers a productive framework for study of contemporary literature, because it makes it possible to rethink some of conventions of literary studies that are not keeping pace with developments in literary writing. Literary studies within academy continue to be organized largely in national terms, such as German, French, Italian, or American studies, much as they have been since their inception. Indeed, emergence of an academic interest in literature as an object of systematic investigation in nineteenth century coincided with formation of many modem nation-states. For many countries, construction of a coherent literary history was central to development of a national consciousness based on a perceived cultural unity, and literature came to be seen as articulation of a particular national spirit. …