What Is World Literature? by David DamroschReview by: Bruce KrajewskiCollege Literature, Vol. 32, No. 4 (Fall, 2005), pp. 234-236Published by: College LiteratureStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25115319 .

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234 College Literature 32.4 [Fall 2005]

between several simultaneous audiences, finding ways to speak to the world

without sacrificing relevance to the village. Overall, Light Motives is among the books that mark a turning-point in

the reception of German cinema abroad, a reception in which, somewhat

paradoxically, highly idiosyncratic filmmakers like Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Wim Wenders, and Werner Herzog were often taken as representative of

German cinema. Halle's and McCarthy's Light Motives corrects this imbal

ance. It provides critical discussion of an aspect of German culture that used

to be of interest to a small community of experts on German culture, and as

it expands this community it invites a broader audience interested in popu lar film to join the discussion.

Damrosch, David. 2003. What Is World Literature? Princeton: Princeton University Press. $65.00 he. $22.95 sc. xiii + 324 pp.

Bruce Krajewski

Texas Woman s University

The large umbrella category in the title of David Damrosch's What Is World

Literature? permits its author to complete one mental jet? after the other as

if it were all part of the same dance, ? la Gene Kelly's famous rain routine.

The book's choreography is choppy, chronologically and otherwise; howev

er, its topic is something that literary folks have only begun to think through, and hardly anyone is able to dance through the program gracefully.

Nonetheless, Damrosch is willing to ask some questions about the dance that

moves continually from the sidewalk into the street and back again. Another strong point of this book can be found in its insistence on

incompleteness, an acknowledgment that no one is in a position to provide a full context for a text, especially ones from other cultures, from other lan

guages. As we have known at least since Walter Benjamin, history, which

includes world literature, is mediated, most often by those whose interests

influence the reports. Reading is an insufficient condition for understanding

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Book Reviews 235

history and acting upon it. Perhaps the best we can hope for are readers who

know that they are partisan and non-omniscient, not that this is the best for

which Damrosch hopes. His allegiance is to "detached engagement." Damrosch wants to have his culture and oppose it too?at least by ges

turing in a direction that might be interpreted as oppositional. He begins What Is World Literature? with an epigraph from The Communist Manifesto,

cgusing at least one reader to think the Manifesto and its critique of capital ism must have special significance for the author (the quotation comes from

volume 50 of Great Books of the Western World according to Damrosch's bib

liography), but The Communist Manifesto never comes up again in Damrosch's

book. Now that's detached engagement. The randomness of topics and texts in Damrosch's philosophically inno

cent book illustrates the amorphousness of world literature, as well as its

strength as a vehicle for promoting multiculturalism. We have semi-inde

pendent chapters on Mechthild von Magdeburg, on Johann Wolfgang von

Goethe and Johann Peter Eckermann, on Franz Kafka, on Rigoberta

Menchu, and on Milorad Pavi?, among others. Damrosch's definition of

world literature does not delimit the category to something functional: "I

take world literature to encompass all literary works that circulate beyond their culture of origin, either in translation or in their original language" (4).

His statement requires that he define literature, and he does not tackle that

vexed issue. Damrosch's aims are mostly

not about the "what," but about the

"how"; he is concerned mainly with method. He wants to clarify "the ways in which works of literature can best be read" (5).

Damrosch, at times, endorses canons but is not prepared

to spell

out what

distinguishes literature from great literature or from great world literature.

One place where readers witness Damrosch's allegiance to a highbrow/low brow dichotomy is when he tells us, "Perhaps we need to think of this poem

[a love lyric from ancient Egypt] less in a context of Heinrich Heine and

William Shakespeare and more in a context of Willie Nelson and Linda

Ronstadt" (156). Also, Damrosch is willing to talk about literary hierarchies, for instance, in his comments about some Aztec poetry. "Not all of these

poems are likely ever to register as true literature ..." (86-87). Subsequently, he moves closer to taking the reader toward an answer: "Great works of lit

erature do have a transcendent quality that enables them to reach across time

and space and speak directly to us today" (135). What is this "transcendent

quality"? Since we are talking about written works, often works in other

languages, in what sense can they speak "directly"? They speak directly when

they sound the same as the reader, when the text mirrors the reader's con

cerns, the reader's politics, the reader's Weltanschauung. Call this a version of

"identity politics," or what Emmanuel Levinas would call the world reduced

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236 College Literature 32.4 [Fall 2005]

to the Same. Why would we be reading texts that do not want to speak to

(about) us? Yet, those might be some of the most interesting and important texts (politically), the ones that are esoteric, unsettling, not meant for us, hid

den, meant for insiders, like Friedrich Nietzsche's Nachlass, cryptograms, or

classified government documents.

Make no mistake about Damrosch's inconsistency on this point. Damrosch also writes that "world literature is not a set canon of texts but a

mode of reading: a form of detached engagement with worlds beyond our

own place and time" (281). In another place, Damrosch will claim that we

ought not to read texts monologically (in the sense of employing a single model of rationality). His emphasis on detached engagement belies his insistence

elsewhere that no single path to proper reading exists.

Why are some works translated, and others not? Surely, Damrosch does

not believe an answer rests solely in the realm of aesthetics or epistemology, with some works more "transcendent" than others or some more

"true"?the kind of reading for "pleasure" and "enlightenment" that comes

fully onto the stage late in the book (303). World Literature courses contin

ue at state-sponsored universities mostly without question, for the courses'

mall-like qualities fit nicely into the capitalistic culture where Damrosch

thrives in a not-so-detached relationship with an economy that supports World Literature courses, mostly as another strategy toward globalization.

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