ABSTRACT
Besieged cosmopolis may be challenged as contradiction in adjecto. Differently from the media siege of the global village, cosmopolis can plausibly be described as the individual’s openness and competence for multiple images. The besieged cosmopolis thus became a pervasive trope of the cosmopolitan discourse and a sign of recognition for the intellectuals who borrowed from, and built upon, each other’s articulations of that trope. The cosmopolitan recluse of Elias Canetti’s novel was reinvented by Bogdan Bogdanovic and Milo Dor, two Serbian intellectuals who lived in Belgrade but chose to settle in Vienna at different points in the twentieth century. The siege narratives of Bogdanovic and Dor are, thus, not idiosyncratic nor for that matter vaguely universal but rather part of a specific interaction between the expanding cosmopolitan discourse and the evolving siege technologies. Bogdanovic’s key contrivance, the Green Box, had preceded the war by a number of years and nevertheless it would acquire special significance in the new circumstances.
