纽约大学公开课 美国文学

纽约大学公开课：美国文学

Bruce Robbins, Introduction to Cosmopolitics

Cosmopolitanism should be “understood as a fundamental devotion to the interests of humanity as a whole.”

“Cosmopolitanism has always seemed to claim universality by virtue of its independence, its detachment from the bonds, commitments and affiliations that constrain ordinary nation-bound lives.”

Immanuel Kant

“Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose” 1784

“Theory and Practice” 1793

“Perpetual Peace” 1795

David Hollinger, Postethnic America

“Cosmopolitanism shares with all varieties of universalism a profound suspicion of enclosures, but cosmopolitanism is defined by an additional element not essential to universalism itself: recognition, acceptance, and eager exploration of diversity. Cosmopolitanism urges each individual and collective unit to absorb as much varied experience as it can, while retaining its capacity to advance its aims effectively. For cosmopolitans, the diversity of humankind is a fact；for universalists, it is a potential problem.”

Kwame Anthony Appiah

Cosmopolitanism: “ universality plus difference.”

Hector Saint John Revicur

Thomas Bender, The Unfinished City: New York and the Metropolitan Ideal

“Often American history- and the meaning of America- has been framed as a political and cultural dialectic between Virginia and Massachusetts, Cavalier and Yankee.”

What Puritanism and Jeffersonianism share: “ both reject the idea of difference. Neither can give positive cultural or political value to heterogeneity or conflict. Each in its own way is xenophoebic, and that distances form conditions of modern life, especially as presented by the historic cosmopolitanism of New York and increasingly, other cities in the United States.”

Cosmopolitanism

Nationalism

Universalism

Cosmopolitanism

Urbanism

Deliberative democracy

Raymond Williams

Marxism and Literature (1977)

Dominant

Residual

Emergent

Residual culture consists of those practices that are based on the “residual of ... some previous social and cultural institution or information,” but continue to play a role in the present.

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1840)

In all my lectures, I have taught one doctrine, namely, the infinitude of the private man. This, the people accept readily enough, & even with loud commendation, as long as I call the lecture, Art; or Politics; or Literature; or the Household; but the moment I call it the Religion--they are shocked, thought it be only be the application of the same truth which they received everywhere else, to a new class of facts.