Section Days abstract book 2010.indd - RUB Research School ...

COSMOPOLITAN SPACES / SPATIAL
COSMOPOLITANISMS IN TRANSATLANTIC
AMERICAN CULTURES
Dennis Mischke
Philology / American Studies; Ruhr-Universität Bochum, 44780 Bochum, Germany
e-mail: dennis.mischke@rub.de
My dissertation project is part of a larger research plan that tries to historicize transnational
North American Literature outside image-schematic dichotomies of center/periphery relations
and strict national boundaries. In this context my project inquires how cosmopolitan forms of
writing in American Literature can be seen as contributing to a transnational canon of
American Literature. By way of analysis my research examines US American literary
representations of transnational spaces and global processes in the 19 th century. The central
concern of my thesis is the ancient question of whether one can legitimately assume a
common, transnational and cosmopolitan identity beyond cultural differences. Recent critical
work on cosmopolitanism in the light of postcolonial studies has coincided in the insight that
many theories of cosmopolitanism are fraught with aporias and internal contradictions. These
contradictions revolve around the problem of legitimacy, bias, cultural hegemony and
geopolitical embeddedness. I want to approach and tackle this problem by studying literary
cosmopolitanism from a spatial perspective, arguing that actually existing forms of
cosmopolitanism have to be anchored in the complex specificity of particular geographical
circumstances. As primary objects of my research I will study literature from the 19th century
that deals with an explicitly cosmo-political and intercultural frame of reference: the ocean. In
particular, my dissertation focuses on the transnational poetic imagination of Hermann
Melville and his literary negotiation of intercultural encounters. I seek to establish parallels
between Melville’s writing and Jean-Luc Nancy’s co-existential ontology, which both state
that ‘existence’ has to be understood as ‘co-existence’ and that meaning is always a
collaborative product and a collective imagination of the ‘in-between’.