Kosmopolitismus der Geflüchteten. Zur transkulturellen Literaturkritik Anatol Rosenfelds in Brasilien

The article explores the connection between flight, knowledge production, and atti-
tudes towards life and writing in Anatol Rosenfeld’s transcultural literary criticism and theory. The article takes up Roberto Schwarz’s account of how Rosenfeld, an uprooted German-Jewish cosmopolitan, makes himself at home as a “foreign intellectual”.
Drawing on Edward Said’s reflections on “secular criticism”, philology, and exile, it
examines the paradoxical unity between distance and engagement in ‘new’ (Brazilian)
culture which characterizes Rosenfeld’s unsettled attitude to life and writing. It argues that Rosenfeld’s transcultural approach to his objects of study can be seen as the epistemological consequence of flight and exile, which literary studies today has only just begun to grasp as a central part of its own genealogy.