Event date: Wednesday 22 February 2012, 5.30 p.m. – 6.30 p.m.
Location: Faculty of Arts and Philosophy, Blandijnberg 2, English Studies Meeting Room

“Cosmopolitanism, Nationalism and Trauma: French-German Transfers at the Threshold of Romanticism and After” given by Prof. Vladimir Biti (University of Vienna)

“This is an investigation into the relationship between cosmopolitanism and nationalism in an epoch of their complex interaction and most intense dialogue across the French-German cultural border. The thesis is that each of them grows out of the trauma inflicted by its counterpart within historically particular constellations at various community levels (sub-national, national, transnational, continental, transcontinental or global). Rather than strict opponents, they are co-implicated attributes lying along the closely correlated political, social, economic, cultural and/or gender axes. The stubborn reiteration of a sharp opposition between them, followed by exclusionist strategies, emerges from the past and ongoing international transfers in which the underlying trauma of cosmopolitanism and nationalism is unconsciously acted out instead of attentively worked through. French-German interaction from around 1800 until today is particularly instructive in this regard. I will suggest that, after having realized the Proteus-like character of nationalism, we need to deconstruct the homogeneous idea of cosmopolitanism as well.”

Vladimir Biti is Professor of South Slavic literatures and cultures at the Faculty for Literary and Cultural Studies, University of Vienna. He is the author of eight books, includingLiteratur- und Kulturtheorie: Ein Handbuch gegenwärtiger Begriffe (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 2001). He has also edited or co-edited six readers and published over a hundred articles in a wide range of international journals and collections. He has been a visiting professor in Graz (1997), Vienna (1998) and Berlin (2003). From 1996 to 2004 he was a member of the Executive Board of the International Association for Semiotic Studies, from 2001 to 2005 Chair of the Committee on Literary Theory of the International Comparative Literature Association, and from 2004 to 2010 a member of the Executive Bureau of the same Association. He is a member of the editorial board of several international journals, including Journal of Literary Theory and Journal for Literature and Trauma Studies. He received the 1998 Great Award of the Croatian Academy of Sciences, the 2000 Award for Science of the Matrix Croatica, and the 2001 Award of the Faculty of Philosophy for an extraordinary contribution to the research and teaching activities of the Faculty. In 2007 he became a member of Academia Europaea.