Tracing global democracy : literature, theory, and the politics of trauma / Vladimir Biti.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Biti, Vladimir, 1952- author.

Series:

Culture & conflict ; Volume 7.

Culture & Conflict, 2194-7104 ; Volume 7

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Democracy--European Union countries.

Democracy.

Cosmopolitanism.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (404 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Berlin, [Germany] ; Boston, [Massachusetts] : De Gruyter, 2016.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Focused on the recently hotly debated topic at the crossroads of various human and social sciences, this book investigates the emergence of the cosmopolitan idea of literature and its impact on the reconfiguration of the European and non-European political spaces. The birthplace of this idea is its designers' traumatic experience as induced by the disconcerting condition of their abode. The thesis is that the eighteenth and nineteenth century's cosmopolitan projects that grow out of such deep frustrations trace the twentieth century's global democracy. This hidden origin of cosmopolitan projects dismantles the usual European representation of modernization as universal progress as myopic. Rather than being a generous action of prominent subjects such as Voltaire, Kant, and Goethe, or Bakhtin, Derrida and Deleuze, cosmopolitanism is an enforced reaction of the instances dispossessed by injury that search for the ways of healing it. Yet as soon as their remedy establishes itself as the ground for universal reconciliation, it risks suppressing other's trauma, i.e. turns from politics into a police. Articulating the author's position in the recent debates on the structure of democracy, the epilogue suggests an alternative strategy.

Contents:

Front matter

Acknowledgments

Contents

Introduction: The Cosmopolitan Axis: Agencies and/or Enablers

Part I: Toward a Global Community: The Emergence of the Modern Idea of Literature

1. The Divided Legacy of the Republic of Letters: Emancipation and Trauma

2. The Fissured Identity of Literature: National Universalism and/or Cosmopolitan Nationalism

3. The Janus Face of Literary Bildung: Education and/or Self-Formation?

4. Who Voices Universal History? Kant's "Mankind" and/or Herder's "Nature"

5. Who Worlds the Literature? Goethe's Weltliteratur and Globalization

Part II: An Observer under Observation: The Cosmopolitan Legacy of Modern Theory

6. Interiorizing the Exteriority: The Cosmopolitan Authorization of the Theoretical Truth

7. The Narrative of Permanent Displacement: Early German Romanticism and Its Theoretical Afterlife

8. The Oppositional Literary Transcendental: The Russian Formalist Rewriting of Early Romanticist Cosmopolitanism

9. The All-Devouring Modern Mind: Bakhtin's Cosmopolitan Self

10. Countering the Empirical Evidence: From Immigrant Cosmopolitanism to a Cosmopolitanism of the Disregarded

11. Political and/or Literary Community: From Class to Messianic Cosmopolitanism

12. Literature as Deterritorialization: New Vistas for Democracy?

Epilogue: The Practice of Recommencing: Toward a Cosmopolitanism of the Dispossessed Belonging

References

Index

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (ebrary, viewed February 10, 2016).

ISBN:

9783110457063

3110457067

9783110457643

3110457644

OCLC:

979690608