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 epis-
temological consequence of flight and exile, which literary studies today has only just
begun to grasp as a central part of its own genealogy.