Cosmopolitan Minds

Cosmopolitan Minds
Author: Alexa Weik von Mossner
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Total Pages: 249
Release: 2014-05-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0292739087

"The book explores the role of empathy and emotion in the emergence of cosmopolitan imaginations through the works of a diverse set of American writers who during World War II and the early Cold War period lived in Europe, Asia, and Africa. It draws on theories of emotion and literary imagination from cognitive psychology, philosophy, and cognitive literary studies to offer a new perspective on the affective and imaginative underpinnings of critical and reflexive cosmopolitanism. It argues that our emotional engagements with others -- real and imagined -- are crucially important for the development of cosmopolitan imaginations. The book concentrates on specifically American cosmopolitan imaginations in the mid-twentieth century, focusing on a core of transnational writers who, for various reasons, had highly conflicted relationships with the American nation: Kay Boyle, Pearl S. Buck, Richard Wright, William Gardner Smith, and Paul Bowles. Their literary works are emotionally powerful indictments of institutionalized racism and national violence inside and outside of the United States; at the same time, they testify to the complex cosmopolitan identities of their authors. Reading these texts as affective cosmopolitan critiques, the book works out important and complex role played by imaginative and emotional engagements in the development of solidarities that go beyond self, family, community, and nation. Reading transnational American literature from a cognitive perspective, the book adds a new dimension to recent work in American literary history that seeks to reconceptualize U.S. literary and cultural production in its global context. At the same time, it also widens and deepens the array of literature available to researchers in cognitive literary studies" --

Migrating Minds

Migrating Minds
Author: Didier Coste
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 290
Release: 2021-11-29
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1000488098

Awarded the 2023 "René Wellek Prize for the Best Edited Essay Collection" by the American Comparative Literature Association, Migrating Minds contributes to the prominent interdisciplinary domain of Cosmopolitan Studies with 20 innovative essays by humanities scholars from all over the world that re-examine theories and practices of cosmopolitanism from a variety of perspectives. The volume satisfies the need for a stronger involvement of Comparative and World Literatures and Cultures, Translation, and Education Theories in this crucial debate, and also proposes an experimental way to explore in depth the necessity of a cosmopolitan method as well as the riches of cosmopolitan representations. The essays follow a logical progression from the situated philosophical and political foundations of the debate to interdisciplinary propositions for a pedagogy of cosmopolitanism through studies of modern and contemporary cosmopolitan cultural practices in literature and the arts and the concurrent analysis of prototypes of cosmopolitan identities. This trajectory allows readers to appreciate new historical, theoretical, aesthetic, and practical implications of cosmopolitanism that pertain to multiple genres and media, under different modes of production and reception. In the deterritorialized landscape of Migrating Minds, mental and sentimental mobility, rather than the legacy of place, is the key to an efficient, humanist response to deadening globalization.

Migrating Minds

Migrating Minds
Author: Didier Coste
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 323
Release: 2021-11-29
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1000488039

Awarded the 2023 "René Wellek Prize for the Best Edited Essay Collection" by the American Comparative Literature Association, Migrating Minds contributes to the prominent interdisciplinary domain of Cosmopolitan Studies with 20 innovative essays by humanities scholars from all over the world that re-examine theories and practices of cosmopolitanism from a variety of perspectives. The volume satisfies the need for a stronger involvement of Comparative and World Literatures and Cultures, Translation, and Education Theories in this crucial debate, and also proposes an experimental way to explore in depth the necessity of a cosmopolitan method as well as the riches of cosmopolitan representations. The essays follow a logical progression from the situated philosophical and political foundations of the debate to interdisciplinary propositions for a pedagogy of cosmopolitanism through studies of modern and contemporary cosmopolitan cultural practices in literature and the arts and the concurrent analysis of prototypes of cosmopolitan identities. This trajectory allows readers to appreciate new historical, theoretical, aesthetic, and practical implications of cosmopolitanism that pertain to multiple genres and media, under different modes of production and reception. In the deterritorialized landscape of Migrating Minds, mental and sentimental mobility, rather than the legacy of place, is the key to an efficient, humanist response to deadening globalization.

Melville and Repose

Melville and Repose
Author: John Bryant
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 331
Release: 1993-10-28
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0195360206

John Bryant's book is a strong and significant argument for the centrality of the comic and repose in Melville's novels. The purpose of Melville and Repose is dual: to ground the uses of romantic humor in Melville in sensitive readings of contemporaneous European and American writings, and to offer a definitive account of the comic as the shaping force of Melville's narrative voice throughout the major phase of his literary career. Bryant argues that Melville fused a "rhetoric of geniality" and "picturesque sensibility" adopted from the British with a "rhetoric of deceit" borrowed from the American tall tale in order to create his own amiably cosmopolitan "rhetoric of aesthetic repose." Thorough research into American culture and recent Melville manuscript findings, an engaging style, and full, scholarly readings combine to make this historicist study a welcome addition to the libraries of Americanists and Melville scholars and enthusiasts.

Global Justice and Our Epochal Mind

Global Justice and Our Epochal Mind
Author: Xunwu Chen
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 281
Release: 2019-10-23
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1498596347

Global Justice and Our Epochal Mind explores the mind of our epoch, defined as the period since the Nuremberg Trial and the establishment of the United Nations in 1945. Xunwu Chen examines four defining ideas of this epoch—global justice, cosmopolitanism, crimes against humanity, and cultural toleration—as well as the structural relationships among these ideas. Chen argues that the mind of our epoch is essentially the mind of humanity. Its world view, horizon, standpoint, norms, standards, and vocabularies are of humanity, by humanity, and for humanity, and all are embodied in human institutions and practices throughout the globe. Meanwhile, our epochal mind has a dialectical relationship with particular cultures bearing normative force. As a metaphysical subjectivity and substance, humanity is the source of all human values in our epoch and defines what can and should be human values and virtues. Humankind, therefore, are a people with socio-political and legal sovereignty, sharing a common fate. This novel study brings a cross-cultural approach and will be of great interest to students and scholars of philosophy, political science, sociology, and the humanities more broadly.

Psychoanalytic Thinking on the Unhoused Mind

Psychoanalytic Thinking on the Unhoused Mind
Author: Gabrielle Brown
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 264
Release: 2019-02-18
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 0429620780

Psychoanalytic Thinking on the Unhoused Mind illuminates the psychological underpinnings of current societal problems: homelessness, mental distress, loneliness and states of societal breakdown and exclusion. Illustrated with a broad range of clinical work as well as thoughts on art and literature, the book brings to life complex tensions between the individual psyche, the group, and wider political and cultural structures. ‘Unhoused’ states of mind are explored in rough sleepers, ex-prisoners, survivors of institutional abuse and family trauma, and people living with personality disorder, addiction, psychosis and dementia. Chapters describe outreach, assessment and long-term psychotherapy, as well as reflective practice with staff teams and care systems, and learning from consultation, supervision and policy development. New therapeutic responses to chronic risk and to resilience are developed from psychoanalytic understandings of difficulties with containment and care. The collection will be of value to psychotherapists and other mental health practitioners, as well as those working in therapeutic, residential and criminal justice settings and outreach services.

Minor Cosmopolitan

Minor Cosmopolitan
Author: Zairong Xiang
Publisher: Diaphanes
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2020
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9783035803044

Cosmopolitanism is a theory about how to live together. The earliest formulation of cosmopolitanism in the West could be dated to as early as the fourth century BCE in ancient Greece by Diogenes, who famously said that he was a "citizen of the world", kosmopolitês, an idea later picked up by Immanuel Kant, the German philosopher who proposed a philosophy of a world of perpetual peace. When cosmopolitanism first emerged as a political idea for modernity in the European Enlightenment, the project embraced the liberal promises of a globalizing economy, yet remained oblivious to, and even complicit with, capitalism, slavery and colonialism. It centered on the male, bourgeois, and white liberal subject, irrespective of the ongoing disenfranchisement, dehumanization, and extermination of its Others. At the dawn of the 21st century, and in the wake of rapid globalization however, academics, politicians and other pundits enthusiastically declared cosmopolitanism to be no longer just a philosophical ideal, but a real, existing fact. Across the globe, they argued, people were increasingly thinking and feeling beyond the nation, considering themselves citizens of the world. Meanwhile, the global ecological crisis worsens, fascism with different outfits returns in many places of the world, the repression of women, sexual, racial, class and other minorities on a global scale persists; the so called "refugee crisis" inundates the mediascape and political spectacle. Not much of those cosmopolitan promises have left it seems. Perhaps precisely because of this, however, it seems to be an absolute necessity for scholars, activists, and artists today to face the complexities and promises cosmopolitanism has raised although not adequately answered. What has happened to the cosmopolitan promise, and who betrayed it?.

Global Citizenship, Ecomedia and English Language Education

Global Citizenship, Ecomedia and English Language Education
Author: Ricardo Römhild
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 356
Release: 2024-01-15
Genre: Education
ISBN: 3031446747

This book presents a unique framework for the inclusion of ecomedia in the English language classroom to help learners cultivate global citizenship. Foregrounding learner agency in a world at risk, the author proposes a framework that hinges on human rights and critical eco-cosmopolitanism to help learners position themselves in discourses on climate change and act for transformation. The book discusses eco-documentaries as multimodal, factional texts against the background of cutting-edge research, refuting a definition based on the binary of fiction and non-fiction. Translating the insights gained from this discussion to the language education context, learners are conceptualised as active designers of meaning making when engaged with eco-documentaries. Based on this discussion, the book puts forth an innovative, multiliteracies-informed concept which is embedded in a sustainability-oriented pedagogy of hope, which encourages learners to learn and practice languages of hope and advocacy. The book will be of interest to scholars in the fields of ecopedagogy, sustainability education, global citizenship education and cultural learning, film pedagogy and language education, as well as language educators.