ABSTRACT
Modern cosmopolitanism is largely an affair of philosophy and the social sciences. Whether one thinks of the ideal ethical projects of worldwide solidarity of the eighteenth-century French philosophes or Kant, or of more recently emerging discourses of new cosmopolitanism in our era of economic globalization, transnational migration, and global communications, literature seems to have little pertinence to the construction of normative cosmopolitan principles for the regulation of institutional actors on the global stage or to the study of the proliferating associations and networks that envelop the entire globe. Cosmopolitanism is primarily about viewing oneself as part of a world, a circle of belonging that transcends the limited ties of kinship and country to embrace the whole of humanity. However, since one cannot see the universe, the world, or humanity, the cosmopolitan optic is not one of perceptual experience but of the imagination. World literature is an important aspect of cosmopolitanism because it is a type of world-making activity that enables us to imagine a world.
