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

这个研究项目追溯了波兰世界主义的谱系，在这样做的过程中，它试图提供双重纠正：首先，方法论民族主义已经成为该地区大多数研究的特征；第二，在更广泛的关于世界主义的学术辩论中，中欧和东欧的观点明显缺失，世界主义同时是一种全球和本土现象。通过这种方式，它试图为中东欧的文化史提供一个原创的、批判性的研究视角，并为跨和超国家的民族认同话语的比较全球史做出贡献。世界主义既是“研究的对象，也是研究社会世界的独特方法”（Delanty 2006）。因此，本研究项目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、比较和混合的世界主义解释性阅读方法。重要的是，该项目的中心主题世界主义被理解为一种可塑和动态变化的策略，而不是作为一个预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19世纪和20世纪早期波兰文化中世界主义想象的谱系。所提出的研究试图回答的主要问题是：在19世纪和20世纪初，讲波兰语的作家和知识分子在表达社区和集体身份时，以何种方式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，互文考虑和权力关系是本研究的前沿。小说、短篇小说、戏剧和诗歌被视为文化工艺品，见证了波兰知识环境的变化，同时也是更广泛的全球文学体系中的节点。对知识分子个人作品的研究将为世界主义的发展提供有意义的线索，世界主义既是帝国主义和民族主义主导意识形态的暗流，也是反话语。

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.