Cosmopolitanism and Planetary Studies: Paradigms for Rewriting the Past

Letitia Guran

doi:10.31178/ubr.11.1.10

Abstract

This paper discusses recent models of world literature rewriting in light of the 2018 Romanian Literature as World Literature, which remaps some of the most representative Romanian authors and movements according to the intersectional frameworks advanced by Immanuel Wallerstein’s world systemstheory, Pascale Casanova’s world republic of letters, and others. In their plea for what the book’s editors call planetary, cosmopolitan studies, the sixteen contributors reread canonical Romanian texts and advocate for a new literary world order, within which Romanian literature is regarded in a less hierarchical/dichotomic fashion, as a literature of the world. This initiative seeks to reposition Romanian literature as a diverse, active, and dynamic partner in the world’s cultural dialogue. My essay addresses a paradox which is very much at the centre of the book: how can one promote intercultural, non-hegemonic models of dialogue when translation and marketability still restrict the participation of “marginal” cultures in the planetary, cosmopolitan exchange of ideas?

Highlights

This paper discusses recent models of world literature rewriting in light of the 2018 Romanian Literature as World Literature, which remaps some of the most representative Romanian authors and movements according to the intersectional frameworks advanced by Immanuel Wallerstein’s world systemstheory, Pascale Casanova’s world republic of letters, and others
As early as 1995 Emily Apter noted that both postcolonialism and Continental comparatism, „having agreed on the subject’s cultural selfmisrecognition,” shared a propensity to „produce the subject as complexified; pulled back from the stereotype or the positive image; deferred and postponed in transnational, translational, transsexual, and trans-technological space” („Comparative Exile” 90)
By 2015 Ursula Heise, who coordinated the most recent Report of ACLA, Futures, observed that the field of comparative studies could best be described by an emerging topography defined both by “conflicts over how to negotiate the global, regional, national, and local scales of literary production and reception and by comparative studies’ engagement with old and new media; by its position in a matrix of new interdisciplinary research areas, many of which involve science or technology” (Futures 2)