L’Amérique paradoxale de Valery Larbaud Du cosmopolitisme de proximité au cosmopolitisme égotiste

Valery Larbaud’s predilection for certain American writers (Whitman and Thoreau in particular) makes it possible to uncover in his development the paradoxes of his cosmopolitan imaginary. Evolving from a socialist or even anarchist internationalist position to an egotistical conception of literature that violently rejects the democratic and revolutionary ideology that he had at first admired in the texts he promoted, Larbaud would by turns invent a cosmopolitanism of closeness and an elitist cosmopolitanism.