![]() ![]() The lines used by De Kretser are: "But surely it would have been a pity/ not to have seen the trees along this road,/ really exaggerated in their beauty/." The theatrical exaggeration of the travel experience (especially when we return to tell travellers' tales). He didn't seem to mind borrowing the word from the Greek or more likely the French language. He later shifted its meaning to include Jews and it took on an anti-Semitic meaning. In the 1950s Stalin gave the word, kosmopolity, together with the word cosmopolite, a derogatory sense, so as to strengthen the national spirit of Russia or the Soviet Man and it became a crime to be influenced by "Western" thinking, arts, or fashions. Trees and meadows and mountains will only be a spectacle…"įoster was using cosmopolitan to mean a personality style or a future intellectual type into which we will ultimately all be shaped as we abandon nationality and become global or, as the Oxford defines it – being free from national limitations or attachments. The Forster quote, which comes first, is, "Under cosmopolitanism, if it comes, we shall receive no help from the earth. The epigraphs lightly duel with each other. The title is homage to Elizabeth Bishop's poem of the same name which De Kretser quotes as one of two epigraphs, the second being from E M Forster's Howard's End. Michelle de Kretser's book is named – with cruel precision as it turns out – Questions of Travel. ![]()
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