Comparative Literature and World Literature: Toward a Global Cultural Community through a New Cosmopolitanism

Dear Colleagues,

World literature comprises an abundant number of works with cosmopolitan sentiments, but few literary scholars have systematically studied them from a “new cosmopolitan” perspective (Fokkema 1998). Approaching world literature through the lens of cosmopolitanism would effectively break through the methodological bottleneck we encounter in comparative and world literature studies in the “post-theoretical” era (Bordwell & Carroll 1996; Eagleton 2003; Wang 2005). Doing so enables us to scrutinize ideas of cultural tolerance and cross-cultural communication that feature heavily in literary texts, reveal the cosmopolitan sentiments behind the mask of literary nationalism, and construct conceptual grounds for constructing a cultural community across the globe.     

While a cosmopolitan approach can be extended to the study of world literature as a whole, minority literatures, unsurprisingly, are the priority that deserves our immediate attention. On the one hand, cosmopolitan thoughts are firstly or more obviously embodied in the works of minority/minoritized writers from marginalized countries (Wang 2014; Sheng 2019), such as American Indian, Indian, Chinese, Korean, Pakistani, and Latino literatures outside the Anglo-America mainstream literature; on the other hand, there is white mainstream literature in Anglo-America or Europe that contains cosmopolitan ideas or tendencies. A cosmopolitan perspective is suitable to study the well-known contemporary writers, such as Vladimir Nabokov, V.S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, Kazuo Ishiguro, Zadie Smith, Jhumpa Lahiri, Maxine Hong Kingston, Junot Díaz, Toni Morrison, and John Maxwell Coetzee. It is also highly useful for the study of many classic authors such as Goethe, Henry James, Catherine Anne Porter, Gertrude Stein, Edith Wharton, Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, and Joseph Rudyard Kipling, among others.    

As some sharp-sighted scholars have long been aware, a cosmopolitan perspective is productive in both the fields of world literature studies and comparative literature studies. For instance, when commenting on the current condition of comparative literature in the 21st century, Daiyun Yue, a prestigious scholar of comparative literature and professor at Peking University, has repeatedly highlighted the urgency to oppose narrow nationalism, cultural isolationism, the model of cultural dichotomy, and the "centrism" of any country. She argues, “history has long proved that the mutual stimulation of different cultures is an important driving force for cultural development” (Yue, 2021). She further urges that cultural tolerance and “he er bu tong” (harmony without uniformity) can help to shape a “new humanism” that promotes mutual appreciation among different cultures (Yue, 2021). National literature, inseparable from world literature, is likewise imbued with the spirit of cosmopolitanism that undoubtedly contributes to its construction. David Damrosch in his book, What is World Literature, convincingly demonstrates the important role played by the idea of cosmopolitanism in the construction of world literature (Damrosch, 2003). These scholars’ emphasis on the concept of world literature and the values of “new humanism” and “harmony without uniformity” undoubtedly suggests a very strong literary or cultural cosmopolitanism.    

In this Special Issue that we have called “Comparative Literature and World Literature: Toward a Global Cultural Community through a New Cosmopolitanisms,” the authors will, hopefully, explore the forms and implications of cultural interactions in contemporary and classic literary texts from a cosmopolitan perspective. The issues that could be studied include, but are certainly not limited to:    

• Comparative literature and world literature from the perspective of cosmopolitanism;    
• New cosmopolitanism and its manifestations in contemporary world literatures;    
• Cultural encounters and cultural communities in contemporary world literatures;    
• Minoritized cultures and their “survivance” against the backdrop of dominant culture;    
• Cosmopolitanism and its developments/variations/modifications in classic literature;
• East meeting the West: cosmopolitanism and the Chinese "shijie datong" (great unity of the world) in comparison.

Prof. Dr. Anfeng Sheng
Guest Editor

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• comparative literature
• world literature(s)
• global cultural community
• new cosmopolitanisms
• cultural tolerance
• cultural encounters
• cultural identity