A Cosmopolitan Approach to Literature

"In this challenge to multicultural business-as-usual, Didier Coste calls on us to develop better ‘theoretical fictions’ about culture, identity, language, and belonging. Reading with an open mind is for him the upshot of a radically democratic engagement with the one ‘anthropological universal,’ the unity of our species, led by ‘an intuitive empathy for the not-yet-known.’ A ‘thrilling discomfort’ emerges from the diversity of his chosen texts. A lifetime of thinking, reading, translating and dialogue has gone into these pages."

-Haun Saussy, University Professor, Comparative Literature and East Asian Studies, University of Chicago. Member, American Academy of Arts and Letters. Past President of the ACLA.

"As human beings, we are all born local and provincial, but the beautiful thing about human beings is the ability to transcend our ‘natural’ or ‘native’ provincialism. Didier Coste’s Cosmopolitan Approach to Literature is a powerful call to liberate us from ‘the constraints and delusions of insular, fixed identities.’ With the danger of rising nationalism and even tribalism in our world today, nothing can be more timely, relevant, and important."

-Zhang Longxi, Chair Professor, Chinese and History, City University of Hong Kong. Foreign Member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters and of Academia Europeae. Past President of the ICLA.