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

本研究项目追溯了波兰世界主义的谱系，并在这样做，它旨在提供一个双重的纠正：第一，方法论民族主义的特点，对这一地区的研究大多数;第二，在更广泛的学术辩论中，世界主义作为一个同时全球和本土的现象，中欧和东欧的观点显着缺乏。通过这种方式，它旨在为中东欧的文化史提供一个原创的，批判性的研究视角，并有助于跨和超国家的民族身份话语的比较全球历史。世界主义既是“一个研究对象，也是一种独特的社会世界方法论”（Delanty 2006）。因此，本研究将批判性地分析世界主义作为一种文化自我定位的形式，并阐述一种强调对话、比较和杂合的解释性阅读的世界主义方法。重要的是，该项目的中心主题世界主义被理解为一个可塑性和动态变化的战略，而不是作为一个预先定义的实体或理想化的道德立场。该项目的主要目标是构建十九世纪和二十世纪初波兰文化中世界性想象的谱系。拟议的研究试图回答的主要问题是：在十九世纪和二十世纪初，讲波兰语的作家和知识分子以何种方式在表达社区和集体身份时接受了文化和种族多样性的超国家思想？该项目首先将文学来源视为与其时代更广泛的趋势和意识形态进行对话的文化文本;换句话说，互文性考虑和权力关系是本研究的最前沿。小说、短篇小说、戏剧和诗歌被视为见证波兰知识环境变化的文物，但也被视为更广泛的全球文学体系中的节点。对知识分子个人著作的研究将对世界主义的发展提供有意义的快照，世界主义既是帝国主义和民族主义主导意识形态的暗流和反话语。

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.