On the Horizon of World Literature: Forms of Modernity in Romantic England and Republican China

Introduction

Reading Literary Modernities on the Horizon of World Literature

It was on a winter evening in Weimar in 1827, so the story goes, that Johann Wolfgang von Goethe coined the term Weltliteratur. In conversation with his assistant Eckermann, he remarks, I am more and more convinced that poetry is a common property of humanity, revealing itself everywhere and at all times in hundreds and hundreds of human beings.¹ Following the capacious universalism of this claim, he comments, National literature does not mean much at present; the epoch of world literature is now at hand, and everyone must strive to hasten its approach.² What Goethe calls national literature—the classification of texts of imaginative writing according to national categories—may be old and even self-evident for us but was, we need to remind ourselves, a more recent phenomenon for him. As Raymond Williams traces in his influential study Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, the specific definition of literature as imaginative writing—a shift away from an earlier definition as general polite learning—had only gained currency in Europe in the second half of the eighteenth century.³ The study of literature so defined, and its division into old and new philologies, were correspondingly relatively recent developments in the modern European university.⁴ In the context of the radical changes in the organization of knowledge that took place during his lifetime in Europe, Goethe takes an expansive view, supplementing the narrower category of national literature with the unbounded notion of world literature.

Since Eckermann’s publication of the Conversations in 1835, Goethe’s term achieved global circulation and currency over the course of the nineteenth century. By the end of that century, on the other side of the globe in late Qing dynasty China, reformist scholar-statesmen such as Liang Qichao and Chen Jitong were calling for new writing practices and a revolution in poetry (shijie geming) that would promote Chinese participation in world literature (shijie de wenxue).⁵ Such a move to recontextualize and reorient Chinese writing practices in relation to the concept of world literature would yield in the first decades of the twentieth century in China reconfigurations of old and new, native and foreign, as succinctly expressed in the four-character idiom gujin zhongwai, a temporal-spatial quadrant denoting ancient/modern, Chinese/foreign, with limber relations among its four elements.⁶ Initially coined and conceptualized by Goethe, achieving textual organizational impact and currency first in Europe and then globally, world literature acquired through this process the status of founding concept of comparative literature, prompting scholars in the discipline to revisit it periodically to reestablish its significance.

From the perspective of the twenty-first century, almost two hundred years after Goethe coined the term, this book joins the efforts of other contemporary scholars in revisiting world literature and reaffirming its significance for reading comparatively. It does so by bringing to light the often overlooked disciplinary-historical impact the term has already had in forming and re-forming literary traditions and practices in different sites around the world. It situates itself in relation to comparative literature as an international and polycentric enterprise that depends on the participation of readers and writers in multiple sites. For its focus, it zooms in on literary texts written in two asynchronous periods in disparate parts of the world: the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in England, a period commonly designated as Romantic in terms of Western literary historiography, and the early twentieth century in China, a time of cultural and political transition from the imperial dynastic order to modern republicanism. Both of these periods saw the emergence of self-conscious—and, to varying degrees, programmatic—critical efforts to redefine literature and to realize literature as new or modern in linguistically and culturally separate spheres. Each functions as a pivotal moment of incipient literary modernity in lived and ongoing literary and cultural traditions. By examining connected yet asynchronous and heterogeneous moments of literary modernity in, respectively, a Western and non-Western context, this book argues and shows how the notion of world literature has provided and continues to provide the epistemic condition of possibility and discursive framework for articulations of local literary histories and literary modernities in relation to other literary histories and literary modernities. In disciplinary historical terms, world literature designates a framework for processes of textual classification, revaluation, and production in a plurality of connected yet differently inherited and inhabited lifeworlds. These diverse traditions present varying local configurations of native and foreign literatures, distributions of major and minor languages, and asynchronous divisions between premodern and modern. Beyond functioning as such as a condition of possibility and framework, world literature, this book proposes, serves also on a more abstract level as an ideal that continues to orient and motivate ongoing exposure to and exchange with the foreign. In this latter sense, the world of world literature does not already exist as the equivalent of a map or other representation of the inhabited globe, but rather continually comes into being as that which is activated and reactivated in processes of exposure and exchange. World literature thus designates not only what already is or has been ascertained, but future, yet unknown possibilities that unfold in practices of reading.

This book situates itself alongside recent reassessments of the notion of world literature by scholars in the U.S. academy aiming to move the discipline of comparative literature away from its perceived European, even Eurocentric, bias at the end of the twentieth century and toward the expansive promise of Goethe’s formulation. Among these reassessments, I highlight a few paradigmatic ones. In his 2000 essay Conjectures on World Literature, a programmatic document for the digital project of distant reading, Franco Moretti remarks, Comparative literature has not lived up to [its] beginnings. It’s been a much more modest intellectual enterprise, fundamentally limited to western Europe.⁷ In his 2003 book What Is World Literature?, David Damrosch aims to make texts from a greater range of places and periods manageable for practical criticism by redefining world literature as a para-canonical elliptical space of works that refract national literatures and gain in translation, rather than as an inexhaustible collection of national canons.⁸ In her provocatively titled 2013 book Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability, Emily Apter critiques the rise at the turn of the twenty-first century of programs and curricula of World Literature, primarily in U.S. higher education but also internationally. While such programs and curricula aim to expand the range of comparative reading beyond Western literature, they do so by teaching texts in English translation, very often at the expense of engaging with the foreignness of foreign languages. In so doing, they tend to operate with underexamined assumptions of cultural equivalence and substitutability and to celebrate nationally and ethnically branded ‘differences’ that have been niche-marketed as commercialized ‘identities.’⁹ Against such a well-meaningly multi-culturalist but, ultimately, naïvely monocultural and perhaps even neoliberalist paradigm, Apter proposes instead the study of foreign languages and the specific foregrounding therein of questions of untranslatability as nodes of cultural difference and geopolitical contention.

While this book joins such peers in the common project of expanding the disciplinary scope of comparative literature for educating cosmopolitan global citizens in the twenty-first century, it takes a different starting point by bringing to light the global epistemic significance of the term world literature and the impact it has already had on the classification and production of literary traditions around the world. By paying critical attention to links between local, international, and cross-cultural issues of disciplinary historiography, it elucidates how the definition of literature that emerged in eighteenth-century Europe was fundamental to the reclassification and revaluation of textual practices in China at the beginning of the twentieth century. World literature has provided and continues to provide the framework of connection whereby unassimilable differences between diverse textual traditions can appear—and thus enter into conversation—in relation to the shared heuristic of literature as imaginative writing. Europe as a cultural sphere functions, in this light, not as the center of world literature but as one region among others, in relation to which it has always already been provincialized.¹⁰ World literature, in turn, serves as the framework wherein this mutual provincialization and conversation between literatures and cultures can take place and wherein the world of world literature can emerge accordingly.

This book adopts a limited and strategic focus on one Western literature and one non-Western literature to offer an adaptable approach to reading between Western and non-Western literatures. It makes no pretense of providing comprehensive or exhaustive coverage of the sum of the world’s languages and literatures. Such an ambition of comprehensiveness has often been expressed in tandem with a sense of defeatism before the prospect of quantitatively inclusive representation. So Moretti: Many people have read more and better than I have, of course, but still, we are talking of hundreds of languages and literatures here. Reading ‘more’ seems hardly to be the solution.¹¹ Damrosch channels the comic horror of a predecessor comparatist, Claudio Guillén, exclaiming, The sum total of all national literatures? A wild idea, unattainable in practice, worthy not of an actual reader but a deluded keeper of archives who is also a multimillionaire.¹² Apter refers in her critique of the enterprise of World-Literature-in-Translation to the expansionism and gargantuan scale of world-literary endeavors.¹³ Such remarks repeat a topos that is well described by Immanuel Kant’s notion of the mathematical sublime in the Critique of Judgment: the sensation of being overwhelmed by magnitudes that exceed the mind’s capacity for comprehension.¹⁴ This study puts into question the very ambition of comprehensiveness and quantitative representation that would lead to the sensation of being overwhelmed in the first place. Such an ambition implicitly positions the inquiring subject in a space suspended outside of languages and cultures, as if there could be a meta- or supra-perspective—an Archimedean point—from which to survey and study the world’s languages and cultures.¹⁵ This book proposes, rather, that we approach the fact of linguistic and cultural plurality predicated by the notion of world literature immanently as a lived, historical condition—an exposure to difference already experienced in our various ties and debts, both given and chosen, to actual communities—rather than as an externality that threatens the inquiring subject with dizzying quantitative excess.

By adopting a limited and strategic focus on two moments of incipient literary modernity that continue to be vital for ongoing literary and cultural traditions, this book reaffirms the value and renews the method of close reading for both expanding the scope of comparative literature and deepening its stakes. The task of living up to the capacious promise of world literature, this book aims to show, involves careful, philologically and philosophically informed reading. By philology, I mean here the scrutiny of semantic shifts as well as nuances of meaning produced by manipulations of diction, rhythm, meter, allusion, and devices of repetition.¹⁶ By philosophy, I imply not just Western philosophy or late twentieth-century to contemporary Western theory but also non-Western traditions of thought—for instance, Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism—that persist in evolving discursive patterns and enter into conversation with Western conceptual categories. This book aims to offer careful readings between different traditions of poetics and theory in chapter-by-chapter analyses of select literary forms. In its attention to disciplinary historiographical issues, this book compares not just texts but textual and historical processes that condition acts of iteration. It treats texts as fields of interlocking developments wherein processes in one culture and locale connect to processes in another within a common epistemic framework but depend for their meaningfulness on heterogeneous traditions and cultural contexts of address. In so doing, this book models a deprovincialized close reading that loosens the practice of close reading from confinement within mono-cultural hermeneutic circles while remaining attuned to linguistic and cultural differences. A comparative literature that turns away from the intimate demands of close reading risks missing the surprises within texts in languages one may call one’s own.¹⁷ Even more, it risks missing the surprises of texts and cultural patterns in languages and regions beyond one’s native or customary habitat. In another vein, a comparative literature that diminishes the importance of local canons and traditions in favor of a utopic, para-canonical elliptical space risks missing the very real and weighty consequences that semantic shifts, textual afterlives, and processes of revaluation within traditions have on actual histories and communities.

Finally, in situating this book alongside recent revisitations of the notion of world literature, I make the simple and obvious point that this book performs close readings across languages and cultures. It advocates multilingualism as fundamental to the task of living up to the promise of a genuinely plural and cosmopolitan world literature. As such, it provides an alternative to studies of cross-cultural literary relations that focus on how a non-Western culture is depicted or imagined in the West, in which Western texts are prioritized as the subjects of readings and misreadings that produce discourses about the non-Western culture in question. This book aims to open up, rather, analysis of multilateral interactions in a complex, polycentric world. It issues also an invitation and a provocation to postcolonial approaches to world literature that either privilege or read exclusively texts written in English or other languages of former European colonizers. In his 2016 book What Is a World? On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature, Pheng Cheah defines the world in temporal, rather than spatial, terms as a futurity that literature may bring into being in resistance to and in excess of the world qua product of the capitalist world-system.¹⁸ The hopefulness of such an orientation can only be enhanced by further engagement among comparatists with the complex multilingualism, Western and non-Western, that informs the experience and inheritance of postcoloniality.

Toward Literary Modernity: Reading between Literary Histories and Literary Modernities

This study examines in juxtaposition literary texts from two periods written in disparate parts of the world. The period in question in England, the late eighteenth to the early nineteenth centuries, was a time of political and social transformation and colonial extension accelerated by industrial and technological change. The period in question in China, the early twentieth century, saw the end of the dynastic, imperial order alongside the end of the traditional Confucian civil service examination system. It was a time in which revolutionary social and political change was accompanied by a radical epistemic shift and transformation of culture. Significantly, these moments of historical crisis and transformation saw the emergence of self-conscious—and, to varying degrees, programmatic—critical efforts to redefine literature and to realize literature as new or modern. They constitute moments of incipience for literary modernity and modern literature in separate but connected linguistic and cultural spheres.

Underlying and connecting the two moments of incipient literary modernity in England and China is a common definition of literature as specifically imaginative writing. While corpuses of imaginative writing preexist such a designation, it is this designation, issuing from a particular epistemic framework, that has allowed for imaginative writing in multiple languages and forms to be variously classified, reevaluated, and produced as such. In Keywords, as mentioned previously, Raymond Williams traces a major shift in the definition of the word literature itself in eighteenth-century England from its earlier sense as polite learning through reading toward the specific sense of imaginative or creative, rather than general and discursive, writing.¹⁹ This new usage was roughly contemporaneous with similar usages in other European languages, for which Williams chooses a few titles as examples: "Über die neuere deutsche Litteratur (Herder, 1767); Les Siècles de littérature française (1772); Storia della letteratura italiana (1772)."²⁰ The redefinition of literature in the European eighteenth century tended to be modified by adjectives that connote both national and linguistic categories, whose separateness or conflation with one another remains a question whose decidability is the matter of ideology.

The European eighteenth-century definition of literature as imaginative writing emerged within the context of a secular-historicist reorganization of knowledge that yielded the modern university and the three-part division of the natural sciences, the humanities, and the social sciences that still obtains around the world today and organizes international scholarly collaboration. This definition reached China in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through informal means as well as through scholarship whose impact was exerted in a disciplinary-institutional context. Besides the informal channel of translations of literature for popular reading, a scholarly corpus consisting of literary histories, anthologies, biographies, and other taxonomic enterprises circulated to China as it did to other parts of the world throughout the nineteenth century. Such scholarship occasioned in China redefinitions, reclassifications, and revaluations of existing textual practices and forms of writing and often served as sources for translation, imitation, and adaptation. As an effect of the circulation of such a corpus of knowledge, the first Western-style literary history of China appeared in 1904, written by Lin Chuanjia on commission from the Imperial University of Peking, established in 1898, for use in its literature program. As David Der-wei Wang writes, looking back at precursors of his own editorial project in A New Literary History of Modern China (2017), "Lin’s history is an eclectic undertaking that comprises genre classification, philological inquiry and chronological periodization and was modeled after the Japanese scholar Sasagawa Rinpu’s … History of Chinese Literature (1898), which was in turn inspired by European literary histories."²¹ Lin’s 1904 text was the first among numerous endeavors in late Qing and Republican China to reclassify and reevaluate, with varying degrees of critical sophistication, the tradition of Chinese letters according to criteria attending the definition of literature within the structure of the modern Enlightenment university.²² Such historiographical efforts were contemporaneous with public calls, often with pronouncedly nationalistic inflections, for the writing of a modern literature imagined as adequate to a new China. Significantly, in both European and Chinese contexts on opposite ends of the long nineteenth century, literary history appears to be cognate with literary modernity: a particular conception of the latter gives rise to the former, which in circular fashion produces lines and logics of division between old and new, ancient and modern. The global transmission of positivistic scholarship about literature in the long nineteenth century serves as condition of possibility for heterogeneous linguistic and cultural traditions—among them English and Chinese—to enter into conversation with one another.

But, as Paul de Man cautions with rigorous clarity in his 1969 essay Literary History and Literary Modernity, literary modernity is an unstable concept that unsettles the claims of literary history.²³ Literary modernity is unstable for two reasons. First, literature is ontologically a self-contradictory entity. Defined as imaginative writing within a modern epistemic configuration grounded on the authority of reason, literature haunts this very framework as an excess that exposes the limits of reason, manifesting itself negatively in modes of irony and ambiguity and gesturing beyond what can simply be stated as known. Second, modernity is a temporal category of presentness and immediacy and, as such, exists in amnesiac tension with history defined according to a model of patrilineal, genetic extension. Given the conceptual instability of literary modernity, de Man infers that a positivist history of literature, [as] a collection of empirical data, can only be a history of what literature is not. At best, he adds, it would be a preliminary classification opening the way for actual literary study, and at worst, an obstacle in the way of literary understanding.²⁴

De Man’s remarks about the challenge of reading literary modernity with and against literary history are directed intensively to the context of Western Europe. My study is concerned with a comparative reading of greater cross-cultural scope: the languages in question are radically different; the traditions do not share a past in the Latin Middle Ages or a nexus in the Abrahamic religions. As such, it argues that literary history does not just serve as a preliminary classification for literary study but has indispensable heuristic value for opening up hermeneutic circles of mono-lingualism or monoculturalism, be these Eurocentric, Sinocentric, or a scientistic aculturalist globalism. Approached through the modes of cross-cultural comparative reading performed in this study, literary history and literary modernity become realized in the plural as literary histories and literary modernities. In the plural, moreover, these histories and modernities work in productive tension with one another insofar as the former are not just inventories of facts about languages and literatures but vitally operative as elements of linguistically embedded and culturally differentiated pasts that return in and animate enactments of literary modernity. Literary modernity thus no longer can appear in the singular as an inherent or self-evident attribute of what is called world literature. Instead, it reemerges as the effect of the plurality and complexity of literary modernities.

But this does not mean that the notion of literary modernity, in the singular, has no place. Once we