Litteraturvetenskapen och det kosmopolitiska begäret

Abstract

Literary Studies and Cosmopolitan Desire

With a focus on Swedish and English translations of the Brazilian war narrative Os sertões (1902) by Euclides da Cunha, this essay begins by exploring the conditions of possibility for the transnational circulation of this Brazilian national classic as ”world literature”. A cosmopolitan, North Atlantic literary network – in which the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig was an influential figure (even posthumously) – is shown to have been instrumental in drawing the Swedish translator Thomas Warburton’s attention to Os sertões in the 1940s. Having traced the outlines of this translation history, the essay provides a theoretical excursus on the dynamic of cosmopolitan and vernacular tendencies in literary history and in the history of literary studies, especially the Swedish discipline of litteraturvetenskap. The underlying argument is that literary studies in Sweden has been shaped by a combination of methodological nationalism (with regard to primary sources) and methodological eurocentrism (in terms of its historical and theoretical horizon). The particular cosmopolitanism of literary studies in Sweden has in this way been expressive of Sweden’s position in a specific configuration of geopolitical power relations – a configuration that is currently undergoing significant changes and could be seen to motivate Dipesh Chakrabarty’s call to ”provincialize Europe”. In closing, it is therefore claimed that the case of Os sertões and its Swedish translation can be read in two ways: as an affirmation of a twentieth-century North Atlantic hegemony (and its corresponding form of cosmopolitanism) but also, if we close read the text itself, as a challenge to that very hegemony, potentially enabling a redistribution of the cosmopolitan desire of literary criticism.