English 491A: Seminars in English and American Literature: Literary Cosmopolitanism in Britain

This course will examine three crucial moments of literary cosmopolitanism, as practiced in modern Britain and as staged in works by Oscar Wilde, Virginia Woolf, and Salman Rushdie. While studying various forms of aesthetic, cultural, and political suture in these writings, we will interrogate common critical views about an ironic detachment in the work of Wilde; inclusion and simultaneous elitism, as instanced by Woolf; and a radical celebration of difference and mixture by Rushdie. We will also explore the concepts of a national culture, patriotism, and "rootedness," as well as idiosyncratic techniques and narrative modes which themselves might reflect cosmopolitanism. Alongside theoretical works on cosmopolitanism, we will examine statements of politics or poetics by Wilde, Woolf, and Rushdie for their pluralist impulses. Supplementing our readings with excerpted texts by other modern writers, we will trace a historical trajectory of cosmopolitan literature from colonial tensions in the late nineteenth century to the opportunities and pressures of globalization in the late twentieth century.