The Cosmopolitan Imagination in Polish Literature, ca. 1800-1939

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Simon Lewis
• Subject Area: European and American Literary and Cultural Studies
• Term: from 2018 to 2019
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 398200126

This research project retraces the genealogy of Polish cosmopolitanism, and in so doing, it seeks to provide a dual corrective: first, to the methodological nationalism that has characterized the majority of studies on this region; second, to the notable absence of Central and Eastern European perspectives in wider scholarly debates on cosmopolitanism as a simultaneously global and vernacular phenomenon. In this way, it seeks to provide an original, critical research perspective for the cultural history of East-Central Europe, and to contribute to a comparative global history of trans- and supranational national identity discourses. Cosmopolitanism is both “an object of study and a distinctive methodological approach to the social world” (Delanty 2006). Accordingly, this research project will both critically analyse cosmopolitanism as a form of cultural self-positioning, and also elaborate a cosmopolitan methodology of interpretive reading that emphasizes dialogism, comparativism and hybridity. Importantly, the project’s central theme of cosmopolitanism is understood as a malleable and dynamically changing strategy, not as a pre-defined entity or an idealized ethical position. The principal objective of this project is to construct a genealogy of the cosmopolitan imagination in Polish culture in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. The main question the proposed research seeks to answer is: in what ways have Polish-speaking writers and intellectuals in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries embraced supranational ideas of cultural and ethnic diversity in their articulations of community and collective identity? This project treats literary sources above all as cultural texts that enter into dialogue with broader trends and ideologies of their times; in other words, intertextual considerations and power relations are at the forefront of this study. Novels, short stories, plays and poems are read as cultural artefacts that bear witness to changes in the intellectual environments of Poland, but also as nodes within a broader, global system of literature. The study of writings by individual intellectuals will give meaningful snapshots into the development of cosmopolitanism as both an undercurrent and counter-discourse to the dominant ideologies of imperialism and nationalism.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants