one might object that real differences exist between universalization and cosmopolitanism, one might equally observe that their effects are very often elided and, in this way, misrecognized. This possibility for misrecognition is especially prevalent in the second instance of her three-part typology of strategies (assimilation, rebellion, revolution) used by writers from peripheral areas to enter the world republic of letters. Casanova’s principal example of “rebellion” is W. B. Yeats, whose partial rejection of metropolitan standards aimed to reorder Irish national literary space. In selectively combining local and cosmopolitan aesthetic techniques, literary rebels regenerate national literature by revising local categories of evaluation and recognition. These local categories are expanded beyond, and thus partly freed from, the necessity of responding to purely national demands, in this way achieving some measure of aesthetic autonomy. With Yeats as its figurehead, the Irish Literary Revival stands for her as the preeminent illustration of literary rebellion. Evident from its being the second of a three-part typology, however, this strategy can be problematic. Not the “denial of difference” characterizing “Parisianization,” this Yeatsian rebellion asserts difference, even as the categories through which difference is identified are diversified and repositioned. This project refuses to forswear either national or “universal” affiliations, to deny either its local or cosmopolitan aspirations. This is to say, its “cosmopolitan intermediaries” are uniquely liable to misrecognize the stakes of their activities, because they are uniquely positioned to define these stakes. While true of all cosmopolitan projects, it is a risk with specific ramifications for literary rebellion.
In place of literary authors, however, Casanova argues that the most important agents shaping this world are “cosmopolitan intermediaries.” This stratum of “publishers, editors, critics, and especially translators” serves as the “foreign exchange brokers, responsible for exporting from one territory to another texts whose literary value they determine by virtue of this very activity.”5 By placing considerable weight on the role of these “cosmopolitan intermediaries,” Casanova maintains that they are largely responsible for determining the literariness of particular works. Rather than as an expressive quality inherent to certain languages and lacking in others, literariness for her is the product of the intermediaries whose work guarantees the movement of texts into and out of a language, thereby connecting the peripheries to the center of the literary world. It is this relationship that is easily obscured in the reckoning of literary greatness, either by hypostasizing linguistic features (or “language” itself) as the determinant quality or by directly linking prestige to the number of writers and readers a language has.6 Each of these misapprehensions bears an affinity to the symbolic and economic forces underpinning aesthetic value (the “upside-down” or restricted field of the avant-garde versus the market-based benchmarks of print runs and sales figures in the general economy), but the analytical virtue of Casanova’s model rests in its attention to the relative autonomy of these procedures for allocating value. Without discounting the very real political machinations at work in the movement of texts in the world of literature, she nevertheless demonstrates how literary space does not ultimately map out according to political or economic geography. That is, economic or political subordination need not imply an equivalent literary subordination, while political power or economic might does not necessarily bring with it literary excellence. At the same time, however, she refuses to grant cosmopolitan intermediaries the satisfaction of their own privilege, the “worldliness” gotten at the expense of mundane, indeed worldly, horizons: “These great intermediaries are naively committed to a pure, dehistoricized, denationalized, and depoliticized conception of literature; more than anyone in the world of letters, they are firmly convinced of the universality of the aesthetic categories in terms of which they evaluate individual works.”7 This, for her, is the essence of literary belief, the sustaining faith in the value derived from successfully competing in world literary space.
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