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Conclusion (eco-)cosmopolitan feelings? In the preceding chapters, I have tried to analyze from a cognitive perspective some of the ways in which cosmopolitan literary texts encourage readers to feel with others across national, ethnic, and religious boundaries. While the narrative emplotment of cosmopolitanism can be and has been approached from various perspectives, I believe that an increased attention to the rhetorical strategies and emotionalizing techniques of such narratives can add something valuable to the vigorous discourse already underway. Not only are emotions at the heart of our engagement with literary texts of all kinds, they also operate in our daily lives and crucially shape our imagining of and interaction with other humans within and beyond the nation. Cognitive theories of emotion are particularly helpful for an analysis of such engagements because they are rooted in the insights of contemporary neuroscience and psychology. As I hope to have shown, the important research undertaken in these disciplines , as well as in the emerging field of cognitive cultural studies, offers insights that are helpful not only for an analysis of the literary emplotment of cosmopolitanism, but also for a more general understanding of the role of empathic and emotional engagement in the development of cosmopolitan imaginations. The study of affect and emotion in literary texts is still in its infancy and will no doubt develop rapidly within the coming years and decades. The important pioneering work of literary scholars such as Patrick Colm Hogan and Suzanne Keen demonstrates the enormous potential of this fascinating field of study. Related research in philosophy, film studies, and cultural studies offers a host of theoretical insights that, with some modulation , can also be brought to bear on literary texts, be they fiction or nonfiction . My hope is that this book contributes to that ongoing discussion by putting cognitive approaches to literary and film emotion in conversa- 182 cosmopolitan minds tion with cosmopolitanism studies. As I hope to have shown in individual chapters, a theoretical approach that builds on Hogan’s affective narratology and Keen’s work on narrative empathy is extremely fruitful for an exploration of the narrative and rhetorical strategies used by a diverse set of American writers who during World War II and the early Cold War period wrote their literary texts with the aim of opening up the minds of their readers to the feelings, needs, and rights of out-group others. Moreover , it helps us better understand how these writers’ own emotional engagements with such others led them to use their powers of empathetic projection in the narrative emplotment of cosmopolitanism. As we have seen, the diverse cosmopolitan imaginations of Kay Boyle, Pearl S. Buck, William Gardner Smith, Richard Wright, and Paul Bowles were the result of the experiences they had at home and abroad, and they critically depended on their emotional responses to the challenge of various nonAmerican others. The fact that none of these authors ever managed perfection in their open-minded engagement with and nonparochial care for others makes analysis of their respective literary texts all the more important for an understanding of critical and reflexive world citizenship. After all, one of the most consistent arguments against cosmopolitanism over the years has been that it is too difficult, too abstract, too altruistic—and thus simply too much against human nature—to ever be fully or perfectly achieved. In examining the trajectories and literary imaginations of five people whose lack of perfection itself played a role in their striving for cosmopolitan ideals in everyday life, we have seen that an imperfect and in many ways ambiguous cosmopolitanism is achievable and—regardless of occasional setbacks or even failures—desirable. It is desirable because a gradual broadening of intellectual and emotional concerns and attachments, which each of the five authors experienced, led in all cases to more openmindedness and understanding. And led, in consequence, to a literary engagement with and for groups and individuals outside of their originary communities and/or nation. Particularly interesting in this regard is my observation that all of the literary texts I have considered in this book rely in some way or another on the prototype of the romantic tragicomedy, which confirms Hogan’s claim, made in Understanding Nationalism and elsewhere, that romantic emplotment has an intrinsic tendency toward internationalism and, ultimately , cosmopolitanism. At the same time, my analysis also provides a different theoretical perspective on Bruce Robbins’s observation that “expatriate novels are often love stories of a sort,” and his contention that [52.15.63...

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