Cosmopolitan Approach to Literature

Didier Coste is Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at Université Bordeaux Montaigne. After studying Law, he received PhDs in French (Interarts) Studies from the University of Sydney and in Hispanic Studies from the University of Provence, and his Habilitation in Comparative Literature from the University of Lille. He has taught in Belgium, Australia, France, the United States, Canada, and Tunisia. He was twice a fellow of Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. He has published some 150 articles in English, French, and Spanish in the fields of Literary Aesthetics, Poetics, Cultural and Translation Theory, and Narratology. His book Narrative as Communication (1989) was considered as a landmark contribution to Narrative Theory. He is now working on Conversations with Hanuman: Studies in Modern Indian Literature and Culture. Coste is also a trilingual novelist and poet; his latest books of poetry in English were published in Sydney (2015) and Calcutta (2019). As a literary translator, he was the recipient of a major French award in 1977.

"In this challenge to multicultural business-as-usual, Didier Coste calls on us to develop better ‘theoretical fictions’ about culture, identity, language, and belonging. Reading with an open mind is for him the upshot of a radically democratic engagement with the one ‘anthropological universal,’ the unity of our species, led by ‘an intuitive empathy for the not-yet-known.’ A ‘thrilling discomfort’ emerges from the diversity of his chosen texts. A lifetime of thinking, reading, translating and dialogue has gone into these pages."-Haun Saussy, University Professor, Comparative Literature and East Asian Studies, University of Chicago. Member, American Academy of Arts and Letters. Past President of the ACLA."As human beings, we are all born local and provincial, but the beautiful thing about human beings is the ability to transcend our ‘natural’ or ‘native’ provincialism. Didier Coste’s Cosmopolitan Approach to Literature is a powerful call to liberate us from ‘the constraints and delusions of insular, fixed identities.’ With the danger of rising nationalism and even tribalism in our world today, nothing can be more timely, relevant, and important."-Zhang Longxi, Chair Professor, Chinese and History, City University of Hong Kong. Foreign Member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters and of Academia Europeae. Past President of the ICLA.

• AcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Cosmopolitan Reading, How and Why?PART 1Theory in Motion1 "Power Failure in Paris": Against Local Theory2 Locations and Dis-Locations of Theory: Toward a Theory without a Fixed AddressPART 2Universals and World Literature3 Universals in Theory and Practice4 The World Literature Controversy5 Worlding and Localizing FictionPART 3Cosmopolitanism Revisited6 Cross-Cultural Negotiation, Comparison, Comprehension7 Cultural Cosmopolitanism as Experiment8 The Literary Construction of Cosmopolitan ConsciousnessPART 4Elusive Identities, Deceptive Origins and Destinations9 Unselfing Literary Studies: Against "Idemtity"10 The Ironies of Authenticity11 Ambiguous Mobilities: How Cosmopolitan is Nomadism?12 A Labyrinth of Margins: Mimetic Desire and Native ImpersonationPART 5The Pragmatics of Outgoing and Incoming13 Exos as Eros, and Vice Versa14 Heteroglossia as Experiment and Cosmopolitan PerformanceExcipit: The Personal TouchBibliographyIndex