Seminar New Cosmopolitanisms and Nomadic Subjects in Anglophone Literatures Di 10.30

In this seminar we will explore literary negotiations of cosmopolitanism and nomadic subjects in Anglophone literatures. Over the last decades, debates about cosmopolitanism have played an increasingly prominent role in Anglophone literatures and postcolonial theory. Writers from Teju Cole, Kiran Desai, Arundhati Roy, Monica Ali andChimamanda N. Adichieemploy the novel to imaginatively negotiate both the possibilities and challenges of cosmopolitanism as a form of conviviality in our transcultural modernity. All of these novels feature nomadic subjects, i.e. subjects, who are constantly on the move and who struggle to make a home away from home. In the seminar we will elaborate the key terms of cosmopolitanism and nomadic subjects and examine how literary imaginations reflect on cosmopolitan configurations. Close analyses of Teju Cole’s Every Day is for the Thief, Monica Ali’s Brick Lane, Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Thingsand Chimamanda N. Adichie’s Americanah will reveal how these texts engage with the predicaments, opportunities and power structures produced by new forms of cosmopolitanism. These at once fascinating and challenging literatures bring into interaction diverse literary traditions that can no longer be related to a single, fixed and stable point of reference. We are therefore going to leave the confines of national literatures behind and explore the dynamic entanglements, processes of transfer and exchange between different literatures written in English.We will examine how these novels create new concepts of cosmopolitanism, especially for the Global South, and discuss how the novels bear on our understanding of politics in our planetary modernity. Suggested Introductory Reading: Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. Americanah. New York: Anchor, 2014. Print. Ali, Monica. Brick Lane: A Novel. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2008. Print. Appiah, Kwame Anthony. Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (Issues of Our Time). New York: WW Norton & Company, 2006. Print. Benhabib, Seyla. -The Philosophical Foundations of Cosmopolitan Norms.” Another Cosmopolitanism. Ed. and introd. Robert Post. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. 13–44. Print. Braidotti, Rosi. -Nomadic Ethics.” Deleuze Studies 7.3 (2013): 342-359. Print. ---. -Writing as a Nomadic Subject.” Comparative Critical Studies 11.2-3 (2014): 163-184. Print. Cole, Teju. Every Day Is for the Thief. London: Faber & Faber, 2014. Print. Derrida, Jacques. On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness. New York/ London: Routledge, 2001. Print. Friedman, Susan. -World Modernism, World Literature, and Comparaticity.” The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms. Eds. Mark Wollaeger and Matt Eatough. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. 499–525. Print. Paul, Jay. Global Matters: the Transnational Turn in Literary Studies. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010. Print. Roy, Arundhati. The God of Small Things. New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 2002. Schoene, Berthold. The Cosmopolitan Novel. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009. Print. Walkowitz, R.L. Cosmopolitan Style. Modernism Beyond the Nation. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006. Print. A detailed bibliography will be made available at the beginning of the seminar. Literaturübersetzen (Master, PO 2008) Universität Düsseldorf WiSe 2015/16 Univ.-Prof. Dr. Neumann Birgit