201342File Attachment9781118407684.jpg

201342File Attachmentdamrosch-thumbnail.jpg

World Literature in Theory

World Literature in Theory

Edited by

David Damrosch

This edition first published 2014 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd

Registered OfficeJohn Wiley & Sons, Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK

Editorial Offices350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148-5020, USA9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UKThe Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK

For details of our global editorial offices, for customer services, and for information about how to apply for permission to reuse the copyright material in this book please see our website at www.wiley.com/wiley-blackwell.

The right of David Damrosch to be identified as the author of the editorial material in this work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission of the publisher.

Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books.

Designations used by companies to distinguish their products are often claimed as trademarks. All brand names and product names used in this book are trade names, service marks, trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners. The publisher is not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book.

Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty: While the publisher and author have used their best efforts in preparing this book, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. It is sold on the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering professional services and neither the publisher nor the author shall be liable for damages arising herefrom. If professional advice or other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent professional should be sought.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataWorld Literature in Theory / edited by David Damrosch. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-118-40768-4 (hardback) ISBN 978-1-118-40769-1 (paper) 1. Damrosch, David, editor of compilation. 2. LiteraturePhilosophy. PN45.W69 2014 801dc23

2013033150A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Cover design by Richard Boxall Design Associates

Set in 10.5/13pt Minion by SPi Publisher Services, Pondicherry, India

1 2014

Contents

Introduction: World Literature in Theory and Practice 1

Part One: Origins 131 Conversations with Eckermann on Weltliteratur (1827) 15

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

2 The Emergence of Weltliteratur: Goethe and the Romantic School (2006) 22John Pizer

3 Present Tasks of Comparative Literature (1877) 35Hugo Meltzl

4 What Is World Literature? (1886) 42Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett

5 World Literature (1907) 47Rabindranath Tagore

6 A View on the Unification of Literature (1922) 58Zheng Zhenduo

Part Two: World Literature in the Age of Globalization 697 Reflections on Yiddish World Literature (19381939) 71

Melekh Ravitsh and Borekh Rivkin

8 Should We Rethink the Notion of World Literature? (1974) 85Ren Etiemble

vi Contents

9 Constructing Comparables (2000) 99Marcel Detienne

10 Traveling Theory (1982) 114Edward W. Said

11 Toward World Literary Knowledges: Theory in the Age of Globalization (2010) 134Revathi Krishnaswamy

12 Conjectures on World Literature (2000) and More Conjectures (2003) 159Franco Moretti

13 World Literature without a Hyphen: Towards a Typology of Literary Systems (2008) 180Alexander Beecroft

14 Literature as a World (2005) 192Pascale Casanova

15 Globalization and Cultural Diversity in the Book Market: The Case of Literary Translations in the US and in France (2010) 209Gisle Sapiro

16 From Cultural Turn to Translational Turn: A Transnational Journey (2011) 234Susan Bassnett

Part Three: Debating World Literature 24717 Stepping Forward and Back: Issues and Possibilities for

World Poetry (2004) 249Stephen Owen

18 To World, to Globalize: World Literatures Crossroads (2004) 264Djelal Kadir

19 For a World-Literature in French (2007) 271Michel Le Bris et al.

20 For a Living and Popular Francophonie (2007) 276Nicolas Sarkozy

21 Francophonie and Universality: The Ideological Challenges of Littrature-monde (2009) 279Jacqueline Dutton

22 Universalisms and Francophonies (2009) 293Franoise Lionnet

not available in this digital edition

viiContents

23 Orientalism and the Institution of World Literatures (2010) 313Aamir R. Mufti

24 Against World Literature (2013) 345Emily Apter

25 Comparative Literature/World Literature: A Discussion (2011) 363Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and David Damrosch

Part Four: World Literature in the World 38926 The Argentine Writer and Tradition (1943) 391

Jorge Luis Borges

27 Cultures and Contexts (2001) 398Tania Franco Carvalhal

28 An Idea of Literature: South Africa, India, the West (2001) 405Michael Chapman

29 The Deterritorialization of American Literature (2007) 416Paul Giles

30 Islamic Literary Networks in South and Southeast Asia (2010) 437Ronit Ricci

31 Rethinking the World in World Literature: East Asia and Literary Contact Nebulae (2009) 460Karen Laura Thornber

32 Global Cinema, World Cinema (2010) 480Denilson Lopes

33 The Strategy of Digital Modernism: Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries Dakota (2008) 493Jessica Pressman

Epilogue: The Changing Concept of World Literature 513Zhang Longxi

Index 524

World Literature in Theory, First Edition. Edited by David Damrosch. 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

IntroductionWorld Literature

in Theory and Practice

The age of world literature is at hand, the 77-year-old Johann Wolfgang von Goethe proclaimed to his young disciple Eckermann in 1827, and everyone must strive to hasten its approach. Were he to survey the scene today, Goethe would likely feel that his prophecy has come true, but he might wonder whether hed gotten more than hed bargained for. Goethe hoped that the age of world literature would be an era of international exchange and mutual refinement, a cosmopolitan process in which Germany would assume a central role as a translator and mediator among cultures, leading an international elite to champion lasting literary values against the vanities of narrow nationalism and the vagaries of popular taste. It is hard to imagine that he would have been pleased with the books recently on offer at the gift shop of Ho Chi Minhs Residence in Hanoi. There wasnt a copy of Faust or even Confuciuss Analects in sight; in their place, a guide to the Residence in Chinese was sandwiched between two volumes in Vietnamese: a cartoon life of Abraham Lincoln, and a collection of childrens stories, whose glossy cover boasted a leering Tigger and a roly-poly Pooh, taken from the Disney film. The Disneyfication of the globe was not exactly the future toward which Goethe wanted everyone to strive.

What are we to make of world literature today? The cultural and political realign-ments of the past two decades have opened the field of world literature to an unprec-edented, even vertiginous variety of authors and countries. At once exhilarating and unsettling, the range and variety of literatures now in view raise serious questions of scale, of translation and comprehension, and of persisting imbalances of economic and cultural power. At the same time, the shifting landscape of world literature offers new opportunities for readers to encounter writers located well beyond the select few Western European countries whose works long dominated worldwide attention. Whereas in past eras works usually spread from imperial centers to peripheral

2 David Damrosch

regions (from China to Vietnam, from London to Australia and Kenya, from Paris to almost everywhere), an increasingly multipolar literary landscape allows writers from smaller countries to achieve rapid worldwide fame. While still in his fifties, Orhan Pamuk became the second-youngest recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature and was translated into 56 languages, Vietnamese included; he has many more readers abroad than in his native Turkey. Increasingly complex patterns of travel, emigration, and publication make national languages and literatures more and more international in character. The winner of the Nobel Prize in 2000, Gao Xingjian, has long lived in France and has become a French citizen, yet he continues to write in Chinese. Cultural hybridity is also found within the borders of China itself, as in the stories of the Sino-Tibetan writer Tashi Dawa, who has blended ele-ments drawn from Tibetan folklore and international magical realism for his writ-ings in Chinese; in a very real sense, his works were participating in world literature even before they began to be translated and read abroad.

From China and Vietnam to Turkey and Brazil, scholars and teachers are thinking in new ways about how to explore and present the relations of the worlds literatures. The gathering momentum of globalization has furthered both the contacts and the conflicts among peoples across the globe, and courses in world literature are rapidly expanding their purview beyond their traditional focus on Western Europe or on relations of a former colony and its onetime colonizer. Often relegated in the past to lower-level undergraduate curricula, world literature surveys and debates on world literature are now becoming an integral part of comparative literature curricula at all levels of undergraduate study and at the graduate level as well.

These developments raise serious theoretical and methodological questions. Considerable perplexities attend the rapid expansion of the purview of world litera-ture, which encounters resistance today from two quite different perspectives: that a global study of world literature is impossible, and that it is all too easy. Scholars, teachers, and students of world literature must wrestle with problems of method, approach, and perspective. How can we gain an adequate grounding in more than one or two cultures? How do we make intelligent choices of what to read in those traditions? Once we have made our selection, how can we do more than skim the surface of complex works that we may need to read mostly in translation? How do we avoid projecting our home-culture values onto the wider world? How do we negotiate the uneven cultural, political, and economic landscape in which our texts circulate and in which we ourselves take part? Goethes Weltliteratur has never managed to become a stable term (what literatures does it include? What views of the world?); how can we make sense of its multiplying avatars as vishwa sahitya in Bengali, mirovaia literatura in Russian, dnya edebiyat in Turkish, and shijie de wenxue in Chinese?

The widened scope of world literature has important theoretical and methodo-logical implications for the study of individual national traditions as well, and spe-cialists in individual literatures are increasingly aware of the importance of considering their authors within frameworks and networks that often extend far beyond their homeland. These questions arise as much with the literature of earlier

3Introduction: World Literature in Theory and Practice

periods as with modern and contemporary writing, as world literature existed as a practice long before anyone thought of developing a theory or even a name for it. Historically, very few literatures have arisen in splendid isolation from the creative activity of people in the world beyond their home language and culture. The worlds earliest writing systems, developed five thousand years ago by the Sumerians and the Egyptians, evolved in tandem and with relations of mutual influence, carried by traders back and forth between Babylonia and Egypt. Babylonia itself, home to the oldest body of poetic texts, was the site of a congeries of intersecting and competing languages, ethnicities, and cultures. The worlds first known patron of literature, King ulgi of Ur (r. 20942047 bce), boasted of his fluency in five languages, assert-ing that, In my palace no one in conversation switches to another language as quickly as I do.1 Centuries later, newly arrived in Rome from North Africa via Athens, the satirist Apuleius of Madauros would compare his facility in switching from Greek to Latin to the skill of a circus rider jumping from one galloping horse to another. He promises his readers delight if they will attend to a Greekish tale (fabulam Graecanicam), if only you will not begrudge looking at Egyptian papyrus inscribed with the sharpness of a reed from the Nile.2

Well before Apuleiuss time, literary works had became commodities that could be carried in saddlebags and ships holds, bought, sold, and traded; an international market was born, long before Goethe or Marx and Engels began to develop their theories about it. Similarities among Babylonian, Egyptian, and Hebrew wisdom traditions reflect ongoing literary exchanges between these disparate regions of the ancient Near East, and substantial poetic parallels extend from Mesopotamia east-ward through Iran and into India and westward into Greece and Rome. The worlds literatures have long been in contact through multiple routes of transmission and influence. Trade routes such as the Silk Road and the sea lanes of the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean formed networks of transmission, powerfully seconded by the spread of Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam. These world religions brought a great deal of literary material in their wake, often introducing literacy itself to for-merly oral cultures. The waxing and waning of empires gave further impetus to cross-cultural literary relations, sometimes suppressing local literary traditions and at other times stimulating them in new and creative ways.

The phenomenon of world literature is thus many centuries older than the national literatures that became the basis for most literary study during the past two centuries. Paradoxically, though, it was the rise of the modern nation-state that led to the elaboration of world literature as a conceptand as a problem. With literary production increasingly seen in national terms, scholars and creative writers began thinking directly about international literary relations, and this subject became central to the new discipline of Comparative Literature. Often such comparative study involved a discussion of two or three national traditions seen as relatively self-contained entities, rooted in a national language and engaged only in a modest degree of literary foreign trade, but other thinkers sought to move beyond the often nationalistic approach of such comparatists and began to elaborate ideas of universal, general, or world literature.

4 David Damrosch

Moving beyond the nation, however, raised serious problems of language, since the emphasis on national literatures was closely linked to the uniqueness of the national languageusually just one per nationand a widely shared belief that the national language was a privileged bearer of the national spirit. Thus the great philo-logist Jacob Grimm declared in his Geschichte der deutschen Sprache (1848):

Since the close of the first century the weakness of the Roman Empire had become manifest (even though its flame still flickered from time to time), and among the unconquerable Germans the awareness of their unstoppable advance into every region of Europe had grown ever stronger. How else could it be, but that so forceful a mobil ization of the people would stir up their language as well, shaking it out of its accustomed pathways and exalting it? Do not a certain courage and pride lie in the strengthening of voiced stop into voiceless stop, and voiceless stop into fricative?3

If language was the bearer of the unquenchable spirit of the nation, this spirit was most fully expressed in its literature, both in the refined language of great writers and also in the earthy wisdom of the people. Jacob Grimm is best known today for the collections of folktales that he assembled together with his brother Wilhelm, and language and literature together provided the basis for their fervent hope that the divided German territories could finally be united into a true nation. In the preface to his history of the German language, published in the revolutionary year 1848, Jacob waxed eloquent in evoking the peoples freedom, which nothing can hinder any longer, of which the very birds twitter on the rooftop. O, that it would come soon and never withdraw from us! (1:ivv).

The very intensity of hope placed upon language and literature raised new prob-lems for the understanding of literature beyond the boundaries of the nation, even as it stimulated an ever-growing volume of translations from a growing number of countries. Goethe, who popularized the term Weltliteratur in German, was led to reflect on this concept while reading a Chinese novel in a week when he was also reading Persian and Serbian poetry, all in French or German translations, together with poems by Pierre Jean de Branger in the original; he also took great pleasure in reading his own works in translation. Yet translation was also perceived as newly problematic by many, who doubted that the essence of a work, so intimately bound to race, nation, milieu, and above all to language, could ever be adequately conveyed in a foreign tongue. As Goethes contemporary, J.G. Herder, remarked, even the tongue itself is subject to continual change:

Poetry is a Proteus among the peoples; it changes form according to the peoples lan-guage, customs, habits, according to their temperament, the climate, even according to their accent. As nations migrate, as languages mingle und change, as new matters stir men, as their inclinations take another direction and their endeavours another aim, as new models influence their composition of images and concepts, even as the tongue, this little limb, moves differently and the ear gets used to different sounds: thus the art of poetry changes not only among different nations, but also within one people.4

5Introduction: World Literature in Theory and Practice

Both in Europe and beyond, the early theorists of world literature confronted the central issues still involved in todays debates. How should one conceive of the rela-tions between national literatures and the broader frameworks of regional and world literature? To what extent were national and local literatures revivified, or threat-ened, by the influx of works flowing downstream from major metropolitan centers to smaller or peripheral cultures, and from world languages to local languages? Should the study of world literature seek to discover unities across the worlds tradi-tions, or are such cosmopolitan unities little more than projections of great-power values upon politically and economically subordinated cultures? Could literature legitimately live, and be studied, in translation, or only in the original languages? And what should be the purview of the overall concept of Weltliteratur, littrature mondiale, or vishwa sahitya: The sum of all the worlds literatures? The smaller set of works that had achieved a readership abroad? Or a further subset of works, the few great classics of each culture? Or perhaps only the classics of ancient Greece and Rome and the major modern Western European powers? How far should oral and folk traditions be brought into the picture? What of popular literature in the nascent world of the bestseller? The 34 essays collected here, several translated for the first time into English, offer a wide range of classic essays and recent reflections on the theory and practice of world literature.

The first part of this volume, Origins, brings together important statements on world literature from the 1820s through the 1920s, beginning with Goethes seminal reflections on Weltliteratur in his conversations with Johann Peter Eckermann in the late 1820s. Goethe never devoted an extended exposition to his views, but his con-versations with Eckermann give a vivid picture of the possibilities and the parame-ters of world literature as seen by a leading practitioner. This selection is followed by a selection from John Pizers 2006 book The Idea of World Literature, which situates Goethes idea in the context of eighteenth-century German Romanticism and traces its afterlife in Germany and beyond, including its appearance in the Communist Manifesto, where Marx and Engels cite world literature as an example of the growth of international exchange and the obsolescence of merely national markets.

A pair of essays follows giving prime examples of theoretical and methodological reflection by two pioneers of the academic study of comparative and world litera-ture. Founder of the first scholarly journal in the field, the Transylvanian philologist Hugo Meltzl faced squarely the linguistic challenge of discussing literatures from around the world. Having assembled an editorial board of global reach, he established no fewer than ten official languages for his Acta Comparationis Litterarum Universarum, promoting polyglottism as the best check on a cosmopolitan leveling of the worlds literatures under the aegis of a few hegemonic languages. Meltzl may well have been the first thinker ever to compare less commonly spoken languages to endangered species, threatened with extinction by nationalists and imperialists intent on promoting their national language in place of local or colonial languages.

A very different approach is pursued by Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett in the next selection, a chapter on world literature from his pioneering book Comparative Literature (1886). An Irish scholar who completed his book as he was about to leave

6 David Damrosch

Dublin to take up a professorship in Auckland, New Zealand, Posnett gave extensive attention to work in translation from China, Japan, India, and the Middle East. Whereas Goethe thought of world literature as the product of a quintessentially modern mode of international exchange, Posnett argued that world literature first originated in the Hellenistic world, long predating the modern nation. Unlike Goethe, Posnett saw the emergence of world literature as a decidedly mixed blessing. Anticipating current critiques of airport novels, Posnett argued that writers such as Apuleius had reached an empire-wide audience at the expense of a deep connection to their own culture, resulting in a deracinated mode of writing more suited to satire than to sincerity, though with Hellenistic writers showing a new appreciation both for the individual and for the wider natural world beyond their city walls.

Ideas of world literature spread far beyond Europe in the early decades of the twentieth century. Origins concludes with two path-breaking statements on world literature from very different locations. In his 1907 essay on vishwa sahitya or world literature, Rabindranath Tagore speaks of the universal values that world literature can embodyan argument that served a strategic local purpose of its own, offering a counter to Englands strategy of ruling its colonial possessions in India by dividing and conquering. Tagores universalism had an outward as well as an inward-looking use; a few years after delivering his lecture, Tagore undertook the step of translating his book-length poem Gitanjali into English, a self-translation that led to his becoming the first Asian winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913.

Chinese intellectuals began discussing the idea as well in the years leading up to the New Culture Movement of 191521, in an outgrowth of their concern to mod-ernize Chinese culture and strengthen the nation against the military, economic, and cultural incursions of the Western powers and of imperial Japan alike. Appropriately, the term world literature (shijie de wenxue) made an early appear-ance in Chinese in the first modern history of Chinese literature, the History of Chinese Literature by Huang Ren (1907). In that same year, the concept also appeared in the Chinese translation from Japanese of Marx and Engels Communist Manifesto, in the form literature of the world, adapted from the Japanese translation of Weltliteratur.5 Seeking alternatives to classical literary forms inherited from the feudal era, reformists such as Lu Xun and Hu Shih increased the internationalization of Chinese literature, both through their own periods of travel and study abroad and through extensive projects of translation from Japanese and from several European languages. Given here is an important essay reflecting this ambitious cultural project, A View on the Unification of Literature, by Zheng Zhenduo, who emphasizes the need to study literature beyond national and regional boundaries. For Zheng, the unification of literature becomes a means of strengthening the nation to resist less desirable modes of unification.

The second section of the volume takes up the status of world literature in the age of globalization. Though this process has accelerated in recent decades, it was already fully underway in the early decades of the twentieth century, when the growth of worldwide literary networks gave new impetus to reflection on the possi-bilities and the challenges for literary circulation on a worldwide scale. Globalization is

7Introduction: World Literature in Theory and Practice

often associated with the hegemony of a few major powers, but cultural production has never simply reflected great-power politics or economics, and widely dispersed communities and literary movements can share works around the world. Thus in the 1930s, writers in Yiddish journals both in Europe and in the United States dis-cussed Yiddish writing as velt-literatur, composed by writers from Argentina and Mexico to Poland, Palestine, and China. This section begins with a pair of essays from the late 1930s reflecting on the worldwide spread of a diasporic literature whose writers sought to create a quasi-territory for their people in the absence of a physical nation.

The ensuing essays in this section reflect the full-blown globalization that took hold in the 1960s with the rapid growth of multinational corporations and the increasing internationalization of many forms of cultural production, including thebook trade. Writing in 1974, Ren Etiemble urged his colleagues to look beyond the borders of national literature departments and area studies programs, and to reconceive of world literary studies in light of the realignments of the postwar world, and in particular the growing economic power and cultural influence of East Asia. Etiemble argued that a global approach is needed to keep us from projecting our own cultural values as false universals; genuine invariants across cultures can be discerned by direct study of the worlds literatures. Very differently, in the 1980s the classicist Marcel Detienne began a two-decade-long collaborative project of study-ing ancient cultures, finding illuminating differences rather than universals; his essay reflects on the experience of comparing the incomparablea salutary per-spective for the study of contemporary literatures as well, as cultural differences have proven to persist and can even be heightened in the process of global contact and contestation.

The next two essays carry the discussion into the realm of literary theory. Edward Saids influential essay Traveling Theory extends reconsideration to the sphere of theory itself, considering the ways in which theories developed in a given historical and cultural context cant simply be applied elsewhere but need to be critically adapted to new contexts. While Saids concern was principally with the foreign travels of Western theory in a postcolonial world, Revathi Krishnaswamy proposes a decolonization of theory itself, through a new attention to local knowledges and the theories derivable from different literary traditions.

A series of essays follow that consider world literature from systemic perspectives. First comes a pair of widely debated essays by Franco Moretti, who draws both on Darwinian evolutionary theory and on the world systems theory of Immanuel Wallerstein to explore the global circulation and reinvention of the novel. Morettis project is at once political studying a global system that he sees as one, but unequaland methodological: the vast scale of world literature, he argues, cant be comprehended through the close reading of a minute fraction of the worlds literary production, but requires data-driven practices of distant reading. Building on and revising the work of Moretti and of Wallerstein, Alexander Beecrofts World Literature without a Hyphen proposes a multilayered typology of literary systems that would open out the singular quality of a world literature seen as a unified (even

8 David Damrosch

if unequal) system; Beecroft outlines six different systemic modes that collectively can encompass literary relations from antiquity to the present.

The next two essays, by Pascale Casanova and Gisle Sapiro, build on the influen-tial work of Pierre Bourdieu in the field of cultural production, extending his discussion from France to a global scale. Like Moretti, Casanova sees world litera-ture as a space of cultural contestation, marked by inequalities between dominant and dominated cultures, but she argues as well for the need to combine intrinsic as well as extrinsic criticism, moving in this way beyond the strongly structural emphasis of Bourdieu to find a place for close textual analysis. Where Casanova con-centrates on writers struggles to make their place in the international literary field, Sapiro turns to a further stage of the process, the circulation of works in translation, proposing a variety of strategies for analyzing the internationalization of the literary market.

In this sections concluding essay, the leading translation theorist Susan Bassnett discusses the literary market from the point of view of the translator, understood less as an isolated practitioner than as the participant in a market over which the trans-lator has limited but still significant influence. She extends her discussion methodo-logically as well, calling for translation studies as a field to engage more fully with global frameworks and processes.

If the spread of globalization in the postwar decades gave new impetus to study-ing world literature, the new developments in the field have also stirred up height-ened debate over the problems that attend any attempt to study literature beyond a given nation, language, or region. The third part of this collection features examples of the lively and sometimes sharp critiques that world literary studies have provoked since the turn of the millennium. First is a 2004 essay on the contested subject of world poetry by the Sinologist and comparatist Stephen Owen, itself a nuanced response to critiques of a prior essay, What Is World Poetry? (1990), which took a generally negative view of poetry written for worldwide circulation. In his newer essay, Owen discusses the challenges of understanding and assessing works once they circulate beyond the institutional networks that canonize works within a national tradition, and he argues for a greater awareness of the varieties of poetry both within and beyond the ambit of world literature. Bringing the institutional crit-ique of world literature home to the critic, Djelal Kadir cautions students and scholars of world literature to be attentive to their own positionality, especially when bringing non-Western works into the realm of a hegemonic power such as the United States, as even progressive scholars can end up participating in a neo- imperialprocess of assimilation and self-legitimation.

The legacy of imperialism in world literary studies has nowhere been more directly debated than in France, the longtime center of its own empire and also a prime arbiter of cultural value more generally, whether as the capital of the nineteenth century, in Walter Benjamins famous phrase, or, more recently, as home to an influential net-work of publishing houses, translators, and literary reviews. Presented here is a con-troversial manifesto, For a World-Literature in French, published in 2007 in the Paris journal Le Monde by a group of writers predominantly from Frances former

9Introduction: World Literature in Theory and Practice

colonies, who argued that a distinction could no longer be maintained between French literature (often used only for the literature produced within France itself) and the francophone literature of Frances former colonies. Next comes a pointed response in favor of maintaining the concept of francophonie, written by the conser-vative politician Nicolas Sarkozy, then running for election as President of the Republicsurely the first time in which debates over world literature have figured in a national political campaign. Two discussions of this debate follow: first, an essay by Jacqueline Dutton contextualizing the manifesto and arguing that it was less radical than its signers supposed, still bound up with the neocolonial hegemony of French; second, an essay by Franoise Lionnet, who argues for an opening up of a pluralized idea of francophonies better integrated with the variety of the worlds cultures and literatures.

The final three selections in Debating World Literature discuss the politics of world literary studies in the United States, where world literature can become the province of a well-meaning but culturally ungrounded liberal multiculturalism, often taught in English departments with little reference to source languages and giving little attention to the cultural politics of translation and assimilation. Aamir Muftis Orientalism and the Institution of World Literatures argues that American world literary studies too often presuppose a transparent world of free communica-tion and international exchange, while Emily Apters Against World Literature presses the question of language, arguing that world literary studies usually assume a linguistic transparency and easy translatability; building on the work of Jacques Derrida, she advocates a world literature fully alive to the irreducible alterity of lan-guage. Finally, a debate between Gayatri Spivak and the present editor at the 2011 annual meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association seeks to clarify common ground and to assess persisting differences between current views on the politics of language and culture in world literary studies today.

Theorists of world literature from Meltzl and Posnett to Lionnet and Apter have emphasized the multiplicity of the phenomena grouped under the overall rubric of world literature. It can be said that world literature and national literature display a kind of figure-ground reversal: while in one sense world literature is the broad framework within which individual literatures are formed, it is equally true that for any given reader, world literature exists first and foremost within a national or local context. In this sense, world literature is experienced less as an ideal order than as what is translated and published, assigned in schools, and sold in a countrys book-stores. The fourth and final section of this collection presents a series of studies of world literature in some of its various manifestations around the world.

The section begins with Jorge Luis Borgess assessment of The Argentine Writer and Tradition, which opposed provincialism (and the jingoistic Argentine nation-alism of his day) by arguing that a writer becomes most authentic, even most authentically regional, when participating in the broader tradition of world litera-ture. The Brazilian comparatist Tania Carvalhals Cultures and Contexts gives a case in point, looking at ways in which Brazilian modernists creatively adapted transnational works of the European avant-garde for very local purposes. Two works

10 David Damrosch

follow on aspects of global English, often seen today as the leading edge of a leveling Americanization of culture. In these essays, however, South African comparatist Michael Chapman sees a far more recursive relation between metropolitan and peripheral Englishes and literatures, while the British Americanist Paul Giles builds on the work of Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari to reread American literary history in worldly terms, finding it already deterritorialized as early as the heyday of nation-alism in the mid-nineteenth century.

Two essays then situate world literature in different Asian locations. Looking at early translations of an Arabic conversation narrative, Ronit Ricci unfolds the presence of early Islamic networks in South and Southeast Asiaa literary network of global reach a thousand years ago. Turning to the twentieth century, Karen Thornber discusses the complex circulation of literature in contact nebulae (more shifting and varied than contact zones) formed between Japan, Korea, mainland China, and Taiwan.

The final essays in the section move from printed literature to newer media. Denilson Lopes looks at world cinema in relation to current theories of world liter-ature, with particular attention to Brazil, while Jessica Pressman studies the heritage of Euro-American modernism in the Internet narratives of the Korean/American duo known as Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries. Whereas Moretti and others have debated close versus distant reading, Pressman compares the slow reading required by poets such as Ezra Pound with the very different intensity of rapid reading demanded by Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries sped-up, flickering Internet texts. The volume concludes with an epilogue by Zhang Longxi, of City University, Hong Kong, who reflects on the preceding essays from what might be called a post-postcolonial perspective, arguing for the importance of adapting older and newer ideas of world literature to a multipolar literary world today.

In many ways, todays debates on world literature come full circle back to the terms inaugurated by Goethe and the other early exponents of world literature pre-sented in the opening section of this volume. To return for a moment to the beginning of this introduction, some further words may be in order about the book display in the Ho Chi Minh Residences gift shop. Though one of the books nestled next to Uncle Ho featured an image of Tigger and Pooh, it was actually a collection of Vietnamese folktales. Far from representing a suppression of local content, the Disney image was simply being used to draw young Vietnamese readers into a col-lection of their own cultures productions. The biography of Lincoln was appropriate in its own way. Ho Chi Minh was an admirer of Americas struggles for freedom from British colonial domination, and, during the Vietnam War, various North Vietnamese commentators compared their northsouth conflict to the American Civil War; thus the American example aided Ho in resisting French imperialism andthen the incursions of America itself. Moreover, the Lincoln bio-comic in the bookshop wasnt an American product at all, but instead illustrates the regional circulation of literature throughout East Asia: it was a Vietnamese translation of a Korean life of Lincoln, composed in the form of a Japanese manga.

Ho Chi Minhs presence at the center of this grouping is a logical outcome of the globalizing literary processes in which Ho actively participated during his lifetime.

11Introduction: World Literature in Theory and Practice

The book about him was a guide for Chinese visitors to the site; its cover showed him writing away, not working indoors in his austere office but sitting in a bamboo chair out in his garden, much as a classical Chinese poet might have done. He might, indeed, have been writing a poem at that very moment. Living on the cusp of a shift from the older East Asian literary world to the new global stage of his revolutionary activism, Ho composed poetry in classical Chinese when he wasnt writing speeches in Vietnamese for local consumption and essays in French for dissemination in the anti-imperial struggle in Europe. Appropriately, this book was published by the Gioi Xuat Ban Xa, the World Publishing House.

The essays in this volume offer many approaches to the study of world literature in theory and in practice. Together, they can help us make sense of the full sweep of world literature from Weimar to Hanoi, from Faust to Hollywood films, and from the Babylonian court of ulgi in the twenty-first century bce to the global Babel of our own twenty-first century today.

Notes

1 ulgi B, line 220. Available online at the Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature: http://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/.

2 Apuleius, Metamorphoses, ed. and tr. J. Arthur Hanson. Loeb Classical Library 44 (Cam-bridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. 2 vols., 1989); 1:35.

3 Jacob Grimm, Geschichte der deutschen Sprache (Leipzig, 4th ed., 2 vols., 1880), 1:3067.4 J.G. Herder, Briefe zu Befrderung der Humanitt, ed. Hans Dietrich Irmscher. In Werke,

ed. Martin Bollacher et al. (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1991), 7:572.5 See Jing Tsu, Getting Ideas about World Literature in China, Comparative Literature

Studies 47.3 (2010), 290317.

http://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/

OriginsPart One

World Literature in Theory, First Edition. Edited by David Damrosch. 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Conversations with Eckermann on Weltliteratur (1827)Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Though the term Weltliteratur had been coined some decades before Goethe took it up in the 1820s, it was his embrace of the concept that first brought it into general currency. Although he never developed afull-scale theoretical essay on the topic, he highlighted the idea in several essays during the decade, and he had himself long participated in the practice of literature on a world scale, both as a reader of several languages and as a writer. His multi faceted personality was described by his secretary and disciple Johann Peter Eckermann as a many-sided diamond, which in each direction shines with a different hue, and his personal capacious variability informed his views on literatures ability to cross genres, cultures, and political borders. Writing in a Germany still divided into small principalities, Goethe cast his net far more widely. He moved from Roman models for his early erotic poetry (Rmische Elegien, 1798) to the Persian poetry of Hafiz (West-stlicher Divan, 1819), while his admiration both for Greek tragedy and forclassical Sanskrit theater helped make Faust one of the major works of world literature. To Goethe, Kalidasas play Shakuntala held the world itself in a nutshell and was seminal for literatures abroad: Would you grasp the earth and heaven itself in one sole name? / I name you, OShakuntala! and everything is said.

Goethes ideas of a world literature have come down to us first and foremost through Eckermanns posthumous portrait of his master, first published in 1837 under the title Gesprche mit Goethe in den letzten Jahren seines Lebens (Conversations with Goethe in theFinal Years of His Life). In the selections included here, Goethe discusses Chinese, French, Greek, Serbian, and Persian literature in

1

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Conversations with Eckermann on Weltliteratur (1827). Reprinted (with some alterations) from JohannWolfgang von Goethe, Conversations with Eckermann 18231832, trans. John Oxenford (1850) (London: Everyman, 1930).

16 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

world circulation through translation, emphasizing the authors similarities and affinities rather than their disjunctions and asymmetries. Goethe could thus assert in a prophetic tone that theepoch of world literature is at hand, and each of us must work to hasten its approach.

Thursday, January 25, 1827.

At seven o clock I went with the manuscript of the novel and a copy of Branger to Goethe. I found M. Soret in conversation with him upon modern French literature. I listened with interest, and it was observed that the modern writers hadlearned a great deal from De Lille, as far as good versification was concerned. SinceM. Soret, a native of Geneva, did not speak German fluently, while Goethe talks French tolerably well, the conversation was carried on in French, and only became German when I put in a word. I took my Branger1 out of my pocket, and gave it to Goethe, who wished to read his admirable songs again. M. Soret thought the portrait prefixed to the poems was not a good likeness. Goethe was much pleased to have this beautiful copy in his hands.

These songs, said he, may be looked upon as perfect, the best things in their kind especially when you observe the refrain; without which they would be almost too earnest, too pointed, and too epigrammatic, for songs. Branger reminds me ever of Horace and Hafiz; who stood in the same way above their times, satirically and playfully setting forth the corruption of manners. Branger has the same relation to his contemporaries; but, as he belongs to the lower class, the licentious and vulgar are not very hateful to him, and he treats them with a sort of partiality.

Many similar remarks were made upon Branger and other modern French writers; till M. Soret went to court, and I remained alone with Goethe.

A sealed packet lay upon the table. Goethe laid his hand upon it. This, said he, is Helena,2 which is going to Cotta to be printed.

I felt the importance of the moment. For, as it is with a newly-built vessel on its first going to sea, whose destiny is hid from us, so is it with the intellectual creation of a great master, going forth into the world.

I have till now, said Goethe, been always finding little things to add or to touch up; but I must finish, and I am glad it is going to the post, so that I can turn to something else. Let it meet its fate. My comfort is, the general culture of Germany stands at an incredibly high point; so I need not fear such a production will long remain misunderstood and without effect.

There is a whole antiquity in it, said I.Yes, said Goethe, the philologists will find work.I have no fear, said I, about the antique part; for there we have the most minute

detail, the most thorough development of individuals, and each personage says just what he should. But the modern romantic part is very difficult, for half the history of the world lies behind it; the material is so rich that it can only be lightly indicated, and heavy demands are made upon the reader.

17Conversations with Eckermann on Weltliteratur

Yet, said Goethe, it all appeals to the senses, and on the stage would satisfy the eye: more I did not intend. Let the crowd of spectators take pleasure in the spectacle; the higher import will not escape the initiated as with the Magic Flute and other things.

It will produce a most unusual effect on the stage, said I, that a piece should begin as a tragedy and end as an opera. But something is required to represent the grandeur of these persons, and to speak the sublime language and verse.

The first part, said Goethe, requires the best tragic artists; and the operatic part must be sustained by the best vocalists, male and female. That of Helena ought to be played, not by one, but by two great female artists; for we seldom find that a fine vocalist has sufficient talent as a tragic actress.

The whole, said I, will furnish an occasion for great splendour of scenery and costume. I look forward to its representation. If we could only get a good composer.

It should be one, said Goethe, who, like Meyerbeer, has lived long in Italy, sothat he combines his German nature with the Italian style and manner. However, that will be found somehow or other; I only rejoice that I am rid of it. Of the notion that the chorus does not descend into the lower world, but instead disperses itself among the elements on the cheerful surface of the earth, I am not a little proud.

It is a new sort of immortality, said I.Now, continued Goethe, how do you goon with the novel?I have brought it with me, said I. After reading it again, I find that your

excellency must not make the intended alteration. It produces a good effect that the people first appear by the slain tiger as completely new beings, with their outlandish costume and manners, and announce themselves as the owners of the beasts. If you made them first appear in the introduction, this effect would becompletely weakened, if not destroyed.

You are right, said Goethe; I must leave it as it is. It must have been my design, when first I planned the tale, not to bring the people in sooner. The intended alteration was a requisition on the part of the understanding, which would certainly have led me into a fault. This is a remarkable case in aesthetics, that a rule must be departed from if faults are to be avoided.

We talked over the naming of the novel. Many titles were proposed; some suited the beginning, others the end but none seemed exactly suitable to the whole.

Ill tell you what, said Goethe, we will call it The Novel [Die Novelle]; for what is a novel but a peculiar and as yet unheard-of event? This is the proper meaning of this name; and many a thing that in Germany passes as a novel is no novel at all, but a mere narrative or whatever else you like to call it. In that original sense of an unheard-of event, even the Wahlverwandtschaften3 may be called a novel.

A poem, said I, has always originated without a title, and is that which it is without a title; so the title is not really essential to the matter.

It is not, said Goethe; the ancient poems had no titles; but this is a custom of the moderns, from whom also the poems of the ancients obtained titles at a later period. This custom is the result of a necessity to name things and to distinguish them from each other, when a literature becomes extensive. Here you have something new; read it.

18 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

He handed to me a translation by Herr Gerhard of a Serbian poem. It was very beautiful, and the translation so simple and clear that there was no disturbance in the contemplation of the object. It was entitled The Prison-Key. I say nothing of the course of the action, except that the conclusion seemed to me abrupt and rather unsatisfactory.

That, said Goethe, is the beauty of it; for it thus leaves a sting in the heart, and the imagination of the reader is excited to devise every possible case that can follow. The conclusion leaves untold the material for a whole tragedy, but of a kind that hasoften been done already. On the contrary, that which is set forth in the poem is reallynew and beautiful; and the poet acted very wisely in delineating this alone and leaving the rest to the reader. I would willingly insert the poem in Kunst und Alterthum,4 but it is too long: on the other hand, I have asked Herr Gerhard to give me these three in rhyme, which I shall print in the next number. What do you say to this? Only listen.

Goethe read first the song of the old man who loves a young maiden, then the womens drinking song, and finally that animated one beginning Dance for us, Theodore. He read them admirably, each in a different tone and manner.

We praised Herr Gerhard for having in each instance chosen the most appropriate versification and refrain, and for having executed all in such an easy and perfect manner. There you see, said Goethe, what technical practice does for such a talent as Gerhards; and it is fortunate for him that he has no actual literary profession, butone that daily takes him into practical life. He has, moreover, travelled much in England and other countries; and thus, with his sense for the actual, he has many advantages over our learned young poets.

If he confines himself to making good translations, he is not likely to produce anything bad; but original inventions demand a great deal, and are difficult matters.

Some reflections were here made upon the productions of our newest young poets, and it was remarked that scarce one of them had come out with good prose. That is very easily explained, said Goethe: to write prose, one must have something to say; but he who has nothing to say can still make verses and rhymes, where one word suggests the other, and at last something comes out which in fact is nothing but looks as if it were something.

Wednesday, January 31, 1827.

Dined with Goethe. Within the last few days, since I saw you, said he, I have read many things; especially a Chinese novel, which occupies me still and seems to me very remarkable.

Chinese novel! said I; that must look strange enough.Not so much as you might think, said Goethe; the Chinese think, act, and feel

almost exactly like us; and we soon find that we are perfectly like them, except that all they do is more clear, pure, and decorous, than with us.

With them all is orderly, citizen-like, without great passion or poetic flight; and there is a strong resemblance to my Hermann and Dorothea, as well as to the English

19Conversations with Eckermann on Weltliteratur

novels of Richardson. They likewise differ from us in that with them external nature is always associated with the human figures. You always hear the goldfish splashing in the pond, the birds are always singing on the bough; the day is always serene and sunny, the night is always clear. There is much talk about the moon; but it does not alter the landscape, its light is conceived to be as bright as day itself; andthe interior of the houses is as neat and elegant as their pictures. For instance, I heard the lovely girls laughing, and when I got sight of them they were sitting on cane chairs. There you have, at once, the prettiest situation; for cane chairs are necessarily associated with the greatest lightness and elegance. Then there is an infinite number of legends which are constantly introduced into the narrative and are applied almost like proverbs: as, for instance, one of a girl who was so light and graceful in the feet that she could balance herself on a flower without breaking it; and then another, of a young man so virtuous and brave that in his thirtieth year he had the honour to talk with the Emperor; then there is another of two lovers who showed such great purity during a long acquaintance that, when they were on one occasion obliged to pass the night in the same chamber, they occupied the time with conversation and did not approach one another.

There are innumerable other legends, all turning upon what is moral and proper.It is by this severe moderation in everything that the Chinese Empire has sustained itself for thousands of years, and will endure hereafter.

I find a highly remarkable contrast to this Chinese novel in the Chansons de Branger, which have, almost every one, some immoral licentious subject for their foundation, and which would be extremely odious to me if managed by a genius inferior to Branger; he, however, has made them not only tolerable, but pleasing. Tell me yourself, is it not remarkable that the subjects of the Chinese poet should be so thoroughly moral, and those of the first French poet of the present day be exactly the contrary?

Such a talent as Brangers, said I, would find no field in moral subjects.You are right, said Goethe: the very perversions of his time have revealed and

developed his better nature.But, said I, is this Chinese romance one of their best?By no means, said Goethe; the Chinese have thousands of them, and had

whenour forefathers were still living in the woods.I am more and more convinced, he continued, that poetry is the universal

possession of mankind, revealing itself everywhere and at all times in hundreds andhundreds of men. One makes it a little better than another, and swims on the surface a little longer than another that is all. Herr von Matthisson5 must not think he is the man, nor must I think that I am the man; but each must say to himself, thatthe gift of poetry is by no means so very rare, and that nobody need think very much of himself because he has written a good poem.

But, really, we Germans are very likely to fall too easily into this pedantic conceit, when we do not look beyond the narrow circle that surrounds us. I therefore like tolook about me in foreign nations, and advise everyone to do the same. National literature is now rather an unmeaning term; the epoch of World-literature is at hand,

20 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

and everyone must strive to hasten its approach. But, while we thus value what is foreign, we must not bind ourselves to some particular thing, and regard it as a model. We must not give this value to the Chinese, or the Serbian, or Calderon, or the Nibelungen; but, if we really want a pattern, we must always return to the ancient Greeks, in whose works the beauty of mankind is constantly represented. All the restwe must look at only historically; appropriating to ourselves what is good, so far as it goes.

The bells of passing sledges allured us to the window, as we expected that the long procession which went out to Belvidere this morning would return about this time.

We talked of Alexander Manzoni6; and Goethe told me that Count Reinhard not long since saw Manzoni at Paris where, as a young author of celebrity, he had been well received in society and that he was now living happily on his estate in the neighbourhood of Milan, with a young family and his mother.

Manzoni, continued he, lacks nothing except to know what a good poet he is, and what rights belong to him as such. He has too much respect for history, and on this account is always adding notes to his pieces, in which he shows how faithful hehas been to detail. Now, though his facts may be historical, his characters are not so any more than my Thais and Iphigenia. No poet has ever known the historical characters he has painted; if he had, he could scarcely have made use of them. Thepoet must know what effects he wishes to produce, and regulate the nature of hischaracters accordingly. If I had tried to make Egmont7 as history represents him, the father of a dozen children, his light-minded proceedings would have appeared very absurd. I needed an Egmont more in harmony with his own actions and mypoetic views; and this is, as Clara says, my Egmont.

What would be the use of poets, if they only repeated the record of the historian? The poet must go further, and give us if possible something higher and better. Allthe characters of Sophocles bear something of that great poets lofty soul; and it is the same with the characters of Shakespeare. This is as it ought to be. Nay, Shakespeare goes further, and makes his Romans Englishmen; and there too he is right; for otherwise his nation would not have understood him.

Here, again, continued Goethe, the Greeks were so great that they regarded fidelity to historic facts less than the treatment of them by the poet. We have fortunately a fine example in Philoctetes; which subject has been treated by all three of the great tragedians, and lastly and best by Sophocles. This poets excellent play has luckily come down to us entire; while of the Philoctetes of Aeschylus and Euripides only fragments have been found, although sufficient to show how they have managed the subject. If time permitted, I would restore these pieces, as I did the Phaethon of Euripides; it would be to me no unpleasant or useless task.

In this subject the problem was very simple: namely, to bring Philoctetes with his bow from the island of Lemnos. But the manner of doing this was the business of the poet; and here each could show the power of his invention, and one could excel another. Ulysses must fetch him; but shall he be known by Philoctetes or not? and if not, how shall he be disguised? Shall Ulysses go alone, or shall he have companions,