ABSTRACT
This introductory essay discusses the resurgence of the cosmopolitan idea and ideal, delving into the contexts and limits of the debate and offering a critical examination of the historical and present lexicon of cosmopolitanism. As it highlights the discontents with major discourses on cultural cosmopolitanism, it delineates the new directions that cosmopolitan thinking and the cosmopolitan subject as an object of study can develop. Exploring the intersections of cosmopolitanism with global, comparative, and world literature, the essay underlines the crucial role that cosmopolitanism can play in literary, cultural, and social studies. For the authors cosmopolitanism does not simply describe a condition of mobility, rootlessness, or hybridity. It is a way of inhabiting the world that entails constant self-interrogation, creative interaction with other peoples, cultures, and languages, and a political sense of a justice always to come. It does not only evoke a utopian drive, but rather defines the sense of responsibility for the expansion of democracy, for a new inclusionary politics embracing minority claims, be they ethnic, racial, social, sexual, or gender-related. Within this framework, the introduction focuses on the main questions emerging from the volume as a whole, addressing the question of cosmopolitanism from historical, philosophical, and theoretical perspectives, examining it through the lens of literary, aesthetic, and cultural criticism, and ultimately offering pedagogical applications and practical real-life experiences.
