Those Who Hoped

This chapter explores the relationship between the proliferation of artificial languages and literary cosmopolitanism at the turn of the century: both strove to promote ideas of world citizenship, universal communication, and peaceful international relations. The two most successful artificial languages of this period, Volapük and Esperanto, employed literature, literary translation, and the periodical medium to create a new type of cosmopolitan literacy intended to quench divisive nationalisms and to challenge Herder’s theories on the link between national language and individual identity. Starting with Henry James’s lampooning of Volapük in his short story ‘The Pupil’ (1891), the chapter charts the uneasy relationship between literature and artificial language movements. Ludwik L. Zamenhof, the creator of Esperanto, stressed the importance of literary translation for his utopian ideal and used original literature to explore the complex affect of his cosmopolitan identity. The chapter closes with an analysis of the growth of the Esperanto movement in turn-of-the-century Britain, focusing on its overlap with literary, artistic, and radical circles, on contributions by Max Müller, W. T. Stead, and Felix Moscheles, and on the 1907 Cambridge Esperanto World Congress.

Introduction

Drawing on definitions by Walter Pater and Charles Baudelaire, the introduction sees literary cosmopolitanism as a characteristic phenomenon of the turn of the century. It argues that writers looked back to important formulations of world citizenship in Kant’s Enlightenment philosophy, while also understanding cosmopolitanism as part of the material conditions of their own modernity. The introduction provides an historical overview of the complex relationship between cosmopolitanism and nationalism, from the seminal theories of Johann Gottfried Herder to the end of the nineteenth century. It charts how cosmopolitanism became attached to a distinctive, often gendered social identity connoted by worldliness and privilege, which often masked anxieties about migration and international mobility. It argues that literature played a key role in determining the cultural, linguistic, ethical, and affective possibilities for cosmopolitanism in the fin de siècle, and that our own approach to the literature of this period should become more international and comparative.

Literary Cosmopolitanism in the English Fin de Siècle

Derived from the ancient Greek for ‘world citizenship’, cosmopolitanism offers a radical alternative to identities and cultural practices built on the idea of the nation: cosmopolitans imagine themselves instead as part of a global community that cuts across national and linguistic boundaries. This book argues that fin-de-siècle writing in English witnessed an extensive and heated debate about cosmopolitanism, which transformed readers’ attitudes towards national identity, foreign literatures, translation, and the idea of world literature. It offers a critical examination of cosmopolitanism as a field of controversy. While some writers and readers embraced the creative, imaginative, emotional, and political potentials of world citizenship, hostile critics denounced it as a politically and morally suspect ideal, and stressed instead the responsibilities of literature towards the nation. In this age of empire and rising nationalism, world citizenship came to enshrine a paradox: it simultaneously connoted positions of privilege and marginality, connectivity and non-belonging. Chapters on Oscar Wilde, Lafcadio Hearn, George Egerton, the periodical press, and artificial languages bring to light a variety of literary responses. The book interrogates cosmopolitanism as a liberal ideology that celebrates human diversity and as a social identity linked to worldliness. It investigates its effect on gender, ethics, and the emotions. It presents English-language literature of the fin de siècle as a dynamic space of exchange and mediation, and argues that our own approach to literary studies should become less national in focus.

Transforming Students’ Knowledge about Democracy and Citizenship through Art and the Use of Educational Media

Democracy and citizenship are two values that are closely linked to the education of each individual. Most education systems seek to transform attitudes and enhance individuals’ knowledge by offering courses related to citizenship and democracy. In Greece until the school year 2019-2020, the course “Modern World, Citizenship and Democracy” was taught to 11th grade students. In a sample of 76 students, research was conducted to explore how different works of art can contribute to the expected transformation. Students were given a digital list of concepts related to “Democracy” and “Citizenship and Rights” and were asked to choose a concept and link it to a work of art by submitting their project to a digital repository. The concepts that students mostly chose were racism, democracy, and rights (individual, political, social). In addition, projects were recorded, in which the selected work of art referred to two concepts. The works of art they chose were mainly: painting, cinema, photography, and sketch/comics. The use of the internet as a source of artwork was limited. There seems to be a strong correlation between the choice of concepts and socio-economic reality. In addition, the operation of the digital classroom and the dialogue developed in relation to their projects, strengthened the educational framework, created a variety of perspectives, and contributed to the expected transformation.

World Citizenship in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Juvenilia

In 1858 EBB declared her son Pen “shall be a ‘citizen of the world’ after my own heart & ready for the millennium.”[i] Living in Italy for most of the fifteen years of her married life and passionately supporting Italian unification and independence in her mature poetry, Elizabeth Barrett Browning proudly regarded herself as “a citizen of the world.” But world citizenship is a perspective toward which EBB[ii] strove in her juvenilia long before she employed the phrase. Much of her childhood writing expresses her compulsion to address social and political issues and to transcend national prejudices in doing so. Recent critics have illuminated EBB’s gender and political views in fascinating detail. Marjorie Stone, to cite one example, has ably traced EBB’s commitment to “a poetry of the present and ‘the Real’” and her “turn towards human and contemporary subjects, away from the self-confessedly mystical and abstract subject matter of her 1838 volume….”[iii] We should recognize, however, that a strong political impulse surfaces in even her earliest writings and in her recollections of childhood. Her letters from early childhood demonstrate her precocious interest in power negotiations between nations, and also between individual citizens and governments. At age six, for example, she informed her mother and father that “the Rusians has beat the french killd 18.000 men and taken 14000 prisners”--an account which, though mistakenly attributing victory to the wrong side, documents her early interest in the Napoleonic wars (31 August 1812, BC 1: 9). More telling for consideration of her aesthetic-political theory, her earliest known poem—composed in the month she turned six—in four lines critiques the British government’s policy of impressing civilians (even Americans) to serve in the British navy.[iv] Entitled “On the Cruelty of Forcement to Man: Alluding to the Press Gang” (1812), it suggests in its final two lines the viewer’s--specifically the extremely young female poet’s--responsibility to grapple with the moral and ethical implications of this military practice: Ah! the poor lad in yonder boat, Forced from his wife, his friends, his home, Now gentle Maiden how can you, Look at the misery of his doom![v] Her last two lines pose a question that will shape her poetic career: How can you represent disturbing issues that demand your attention? Although her brief first poem does not resolve this conundrum, by expressing her query as an exclamation, she leaves no uncertainty that she must do so. [i] The Brownings’ Correspondence, 26 vols. to date, ed. Philip Kelley, et al. (Winfield, KS, and Waco, TX: Wedgestone Press, 1984- ), vol. 25, p. 98; hereafter cited parenthetically as BC. For discussion of EBB’s views on the cosmopolitan education of her son and its relationship to her poetic practice, see Beverly Taylor, “Elizabeth Barrett Browning and the Politics of Childhood,” Victorian Poetry 46 (2008): 405-27; and Christopher M. Keirstead, “‘He Shall Be a “Citizen of the World”’: Cosmopolitanism and the Education of Pen Browning,” Browning Society Notes 32 (2007): 74-82. EBB associated the concept “citizen” or “citizeness of the world” with both personal experience and international political concerns. In 1852 she wrote to her beloved distant kinsman and friend John Kenyon about her bitter estrangement from England, on the personal level fostered particularly by her father’s obdurate refusal to reconcile following her marriage, and on the political level, by England’s failure to support Italy’s independence: “I’m a citizeness of the world now, you see, and float loose” (BC 17: 70). [ii] To avoid the confusion of using her maiden name (Elizabeth Barrett Barrett) and her married name, throughout the essay I refer to Elizabeth Barrett Browning by the initials she frequently used to sign her manuscripts and letters. Both she and Robert Browning expressed pleasure that her initials and characteristic signature would not change with their marriage (BC 11: 248-49). [iii] Marjorie Stone, Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1995), pp. 27, 24-25. Yet even so magisterial a study as Isobel Armstrong’s Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics (London: Routledge, 1993), while it ranges beyond the traditional canon to include many women and working-class writers, scarcely mentions EBB. [iv] What were you thinking about at age six? Britain’s practice of seizing sailors from merchant ships and forcing them to serve in the Royal Navy (“forcement” or “impressment”) constituted one cause the United States declared war on England in 1812, while England was still at war with France. The London Times discussed the problem of impressment. See, e.g., “Parliamentary Proceedings,” 26 June 1812; “American Papers,” 10 March 1812; as well as editorial comment calling impressment “the disgrace of England and of a civilized age” (“Upon Hearing Cuxhaven,” 3 October 1811). On naval impressment see Nicholas Rogers, The Press Gang: Naval Impressment and Its Opponents in Georgian Britain (London: Continuum, 2007), esp. pp. 134-38. [v] First published in H. Buxton Forman’s edition of EBB’s Hitherto Unpublished Poems and Stories with an Inedited Autobiography, vol. 1 (Boston: Bibliophile Society, 1914), p. 31; subsequently cited as HUP. Punctuation follows that of the manuscript copied into a notebook by EBB’s mother, in the Berg collection of the New York Public Library; see The Browning Collections: A Reconstruction with Other Memorabilia, compiled by Philip Kelley & Betty A. Coley (Winfield, KS: Armstrong Browning Library of Baylor University, The Browning Institute, Mansel Publishing, Wedgestone Press, 1984), D666. All quotations from EBB’s works follow The Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 5 vols., vol. eds. Sandra Donaldson, Rita Patteson, Marjorie Stone, and Beverly Taylor (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2010); subsequently cited as WEBB. EBB’s juvenilia appear in vol. 5, this first poem on pp. 159-60. On this poem and other juvenilia, see Beverly Taylor, “Childhood Writings of Elizabeth Barrett Browning: ‘At four I first mounted Pegasus,’” The Child Writer from Austen to Woolf, ed. Christine Alexander and Juliet McMaster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 138-53.

Examining the Relationship Between Social Media and Cross-Cultural World Mindedness Among American College Students (Preprint)

BACKGROUND This study aims to explore the relationship between social media and cross-cultural world-mindedness. The authors wanted to investigate the degree to which cultural perception was impacted by social media use by addressing social cognitive theory and media systems dependency theory. OBJECTIVE Specifically, the investigators wanted to assess if the type and amount of social media, or media dependence, influenced cultural world-mindedness. METHODS A cross-sectional analysis examined social media use and dependence, perception of environmental protection, tolerance of diversity, world citizenship, and resource sharing. RESULTS Results indicated there was a weak, negative relationship between environmental protection and social media use and dependence; a weak, positive relationship between world citizenship and social media use and dependence; and a weak, positive relationship between resource sharing and social media factors. To examine political affiliation differences in world-mindedness, a one-way ANOVA was conducted. Results indicated that overall, group differences were present, F(4, 1183) = 98.40, p < .001, η2 = .25. Based on the effect size (η2), it was apparent that a large effect was present. Post hoc testing using Bonferroni comparisons indicated that republicans were significantly lower in world-mindedness than all other groups, p < .001. CONCLUSIONS As social networking becomes more prominent, how culture is portrayed in the media can have a direct impact on building positive cross-cultural relationships.

Hannah Arendt, Karl Jaspers, and World Citizenship Rethought

In antiquity Diogenes was asked to identify himself as a citizen. He retorted by affirming that he was a “citizen of the world” and thus implicitly rejecting local citizenship. Ever since, his political identification has become a reference point in most literature on cosmopolitanism. After a brief discussion of the predicate “citizen of the world,” this article turns to Hannah Arendt’s attribution of it to Karl Jaspers. It explores how Arendt’s related work helps us recast issues of patriotism and cosmopolitanism, get a more accurate picture of her complex view on locality and universality, and introduce new sensibilities into political philosophical engagement with claims of world citizenship. Themes of limits, solitude, and darkness emerge as possible points of interest of a philosophy that acknowledges the centrality of politics in the life of the person whose right to world citizenship is tested by subjective and collective answerability to cosmos.