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World literature - Wikipedia

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World literature is sometimes used to refer to the sum total of the

world's national literatures, but usually it refers to the circulation of
works into the wider world beyond their country of origin. Often used in
the past primarily for masterpieces of Western European literature,
world literature today is increasingly seen in global context. Readers
today have access to an unprecedented range of works from around
the world in excellent translations, and since the mid-1990s a lively
debate has grown up concerning both the aesthetic and the political
values and limitations of an emphasis on global processes over
national traditions.

HistoryEdit
Johann Wolfgang Goethe used the concept of Weltliteratur in several of
his essays in the early decades of the nineteenth century to describe
the international circulation and reception of literary works in Europe,
including works of non-Western origin. The concept achieved wide
currency after his disciple Johann Peter Eckermann published a
collection of conversations with Goethe in 1835.[1] Goethe spoke with
Eckermann about the excitement of reading Chinese novels and
Persian and Serbian poetry as well as of his fascination with seeing
how his own works were translated and discussed abroad, especially
in France. In a famous statement in January 1827, Goethe predicted to
Eckermann that in the coming years world literature would supplant the
national literatures as the major mode of literary creativity:

I am more and more convinced that poetry is the universal

possession of mankind, revealing itself everywhere and at all times
in hundreds and hundreds of men. ... I therefore like to look about
me in foreign nations, and advise everyone to do the same. National
literature is now a rather unmeaning term; the epoch of world
literature is at hand, and everyone must strive to hasten its
approach.[2]
Reflecting a fundamentally economic understanding of world literature
as a process of trade and exchange, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
used the term in their Communist Manifesto (1848) to describe the
"cosmopolitan character" of bourgeois literary production, asserting
that

In place of the old wants, satisfied by the productions of the country,

we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of
distant lands and climates. ... And as in material, so also in
intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual
nations become common property. National one-sidedness and
narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from
the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world
literature.

Martin Puchner has argued that Goethe had a keen sense of world
literature as driven by a new world market in literature. It was this
market-based approach that Marx and Engels pick up in 1848. But
while the two authors admire the world literature created by bourgeois
capitalism, they also seek to exceed it. They hoped to create a new
type of world literature, one exemplified by the Manifesto, which was to
be published simultaneously in many languages and several locations.
This text was supposed to inaugurate a new type of world literature
and in fact partially succeeded, becoming one of the most influential
texts of the twentieth century.[3]

Whereas Marx and Engels followed Goethe in seeing world literature as

a modern or even future phenomenon, in 1886 the Irish scholar H. M.
Posnett argued that world literature first arose in ancient empires such
as the Roman Empire, long before the rise of the modern national
literatures.[4] Certainly today, world literature is understood as including
classical works from all periods, as well as contemporary literature
written for a global audience. By the turn of the twentieth century,
intellectuals in various parts of the globe were thinking actively about
world literature as a frame for their own national production, a theme
found in essays by several of the progressive writers of China's May
Fourth movement, including Lu Xun.

Contemporary understandingsEdit
Over the course of the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth,
the rising tide of nationalism led to an eclipse of interest in world
literature, but in the postwar era, comparative and world literature
began to enjoy a resurgence in the United States. As a nation of
immigrants, and with a less well established national tradition than
many older countries possessed, the United States became a thriving
site for the study of comparative literature (often primarily at the
graduate level) and of world literature, often taught as a first-year
general education class. The focus remained largely on the Greek and
Roman classics and the literatures of the major modern Western
European powers, but a confluence of factors in the late 1980s and
early 1990s led to a greater openness to the wider world. The end of
the Cold War, the growing globalization of the world economy, and new
waves of immigration from many parts of the world led to several
efforts to open out the study of world literature. This change is well
illustrated by the expansion of The Norton Anthology of World
Masterpieces, whose first edition of 1956 featured only Western
European and North American works, to a new "expanded edition" of
1995 with substantial non-Western selections, and with the title
changed from "masterpieces" to the less exclusive "Literature".[5] The
major survey anthologies today, including those published by Longman
and by Bedford in addition to Norton, all showcase several hundred
authors from dozens of countries.

The explosive growth in the range of cultures studied under the rubric
of world literature has inspired a variety of theoretical attempts to
define and delimit the field and to propose effective modes of research
and teaching. In his 2003 book What Is World Literature? David
Damrosch argued for world literature as less a vast canon of works
and more a matter of circulation and reception, and he proposed that
works that thrive as world literature are ones that work well and even
gain in various ways in translation. Whereas Damrosch's approach
remains tied to the close reading of individual works, a very different
view was taken by the Stanford critic Franco Moretti in a pair of articles
offering "Conjectures on World Literature".[6] Moretti argued that the
scale of world literature far exceeds what can be grasped by traditional
methods of close reading, and he advocated instead a mode of
"distant reading" that would look at large-scale patterns as discerned
from publication records and national literary histories, enabling one to
trace the global sweep of forms such as the novel or film.

Moretti's approach combined elements of evolutionary theory with the

world-systems analysis pioneered by Immanuel Wallerstein, an
approach further discussed since then by Emily Apter in her influential
book The Translation Zone.[7] Related to their world-systems approach
is the major work of French critic Pascale Casanova, La République
mondiale des lettres (1999).[8] Drawing on the theories of cultural
production developed by the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, Casanova
explores the ways in which the works of peripheral writers must
circulate into metropolitan centers in order to achieve recognition as
works of world literature. Both Moretti and Casanova emphasize the
inequalities of the global literary field, which Moretti describes as "one,
but unequal".

The field of world literature continues to generate debate, with critics

such as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak arguing that too often the study of
world literature in translation smooths out both the linguistic richness
of the original and the political force a work can have in its original
context.[9] Other scholars, on the contrary, emphasize that world
literature can and should be studied with close attention to original
languages and contexts, even as works take on new dimensions and
new meanings abroad. Once a primarily European and American
concern, world literature is now actively studied and discussed in many
parts of the world. World literature series are now being published in
China and in Estonia, and a new Institute for World Literature, offering
month-long summer sessions on theory and pedagogy, had its
inaugural session at Peking University in 2011, with its next sessions at
Istanbul Bilgi University in 2012 and at Harvard University in 2013.
Since the middle of the first decade of the new century, a steady
stream of works has provided materials for the study of the history of
world literature and the current debates. Valuable collections of essays
include:

Manfred Schmeling, Weltliteratur Heute (1995)

Christopher Prendergast, Debating World Literature (2004)
David Damrosch, Teaching World Literature (2009)
Theo D'haen's co-edited collections The Routledge Companion to
World Literature (2011) and World Literature: A Reader (2012).

Individual studies include:

Moretti, Maps, Graphs, Trees (2005)

John Pizer, The Idea of World Literature (2006),
Mads Rosendahl Thomsen, Mapping World Literature (2008)
Theo D'haen, The Routledge Concise History of World Literature
(2011)
Tötösy de Zepetnek, Steven, and Tutun Mukherjee, eds. Companion
to Comparative Literature, World Literatures, and Comparative
 Cultural Studies (2013).

On the InternetEdit
The World Wide Web provides in many ways the logical medium for the
global circulation of world literature, and many websites now enable
readers around the world to sample the world's literary productions.
The website Words Without Borders offers a wide selection of fiction
and poetry from around the world, and the Annenberg Foundation has
created an ambitious thirteen-part DVD/web series produced by
Boston's public television station WGBH, "Invitation to World Literature."
The major survey anthologies all have extensive websites, providing
background information, images, and links to resources on many
authors. Finally, globally oriented authors themselves are increasingly
creating work for the internet. The Serbian experimentalist Milorad
Pavić (1929–2009) was an early proponent of the possibilities of
electronic modes of creation and reading, as can be seen on his
website.[10] Though Pavić remained primarily a print-based writer, the
Korean/American duo known as Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries
create their works entirely for internet distribution, often in several
languages.[11] World literature today exists in symbiosis with national
literatures, enabling writers in small countries to reach out to global
audiences, and helping readers around the world gain a better sense of
the world around them as it has been reflected and refracted in the
world's literatures over the past five millennia.

ClassicsEdit
What texts count as world literature is debatable. While some argue
that a work's exemplary artistic value and influence allow it to enter the
canon of world literature, many scholars of world literature point out
that literary quality is not inherent nor influence universal or lasting;
rather, standards of quality are relative and vary among communities
and across space and time. As the scholar David Damrosch writes,
"Over the centuries, an unusually shifty work can come in and out of
the sphere of world literature several different times; and at any given
point, a work may function as world literature for some readers but not
others, and for some kinds of reading but not others. The shifts a work
may undergo, moreover, do not reflect the unfolding of some internal
logic of the work in itself but come about through often complex
dynamics of cultural change and contestation. Very few works secure
a quick and permanent place in the limited company of perennial World
Masterpieces; most works shift around over time, even moving into
and out of the category of 'the masterpiece.'"[12]

Thus, rather than gauge a work's worthiness as world literature on its

inherent quality or lasting influence, many scholars assert that what
makes a work world literature is merely its circulation beyond its
country of origin. For example, Damrosch states, "A work enters into
world literature by a double process: first, by being read as literature;
second, by circulating out into a broader world beyond its linguistic and
cultural point of origin."[12] Likewise, the world literature scholar Venkat
Mani argues that the "worlding" of literature is brought about by
"information transfer" largely generated by developments in print
culture, specifically the advent of the library: "Publishers and
booksellers who print and sell affordable books, literate citizens who
acquire these books, and public libraries that make these books
available to those who cannot afford to buy them collectively play a
very important role in the “making” of world literature."[13] Readers then
will have to decide for themselves on what counts as world literature
and whether that status is determined by the work itself or larger social
forces at work on it.

See alsoEdit

NotesEdit
1. ^ Johann Peter Eckermann, Gespräche mit Goethe in den letzten
Jahren seines Lebens, trans. John Oxenford as J. W. von Goethe,
Conversations with Eckermann, repr. North Point Press, 1994.
2. ^ Eckermann, p. 132
3. ^ Martin Puchner, Poetry of the Revolution: Marx, Manifestos and
the Avant-Gardes." Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006
4. ^ H. M. Posnett, Comparative Literature. London: K. Paul, Trench,
1886
5. ^ The Norton Anthology of World Literature, ed. Maynard Mack and
Sarah Lawall, Expanded Edition, 1995. Third edition, ed. Martin
Puchner et al., 2012.
6. ^ Franco Moretti, "Conjectures on World Literature." New Left
Review 1 (2000), pp. 54–68; repr. in Prendergast, Debating World
Literature, pp. 148–162. Moretti offered further reflections in
"More Conjectures," New Left Review 20 (2003), pp. 73–81.
7. ^ Emily Apter, The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature.
 Princeton: Princeton U.P., 2006.
8. ^ The World Republic of Letters, trans. M. B. DeBevoise, Harvard
U.P., 2004.
9. ^ See Gayatri C. Spivak, Death of a Discipline.
10. ^ Pavić's website is named for his best-known novel, Dictionary of
the Khazars (1983), a worldwide bestseller with over five million
copies sold in a host of languages – an eminent example of the
possibility today for a writer from a small country to reach a
global audience.
11. ^ www.yhchang.com
12. ^ a b Damrosch, David (2003). What Is World Literature? (PDF).
Princeton University Press. p. 6. ISBN 9780691049861. Retrieved 7
December 2017.
13. ^ Mani, B. Venkat (2012). "Chapter 29. Bibliomigrancy". In D’haen,
Theo; Damrosch, David; Kadir, Djelal (eds.). The Routledge
Companion to World Literature. Routledge. p. 284.
ISBN 978-0415570220.

Further readingEdit
Multilingual Bibliography of (Text)Books in Comparative Literature,
World Literature(s), and Comparative Cultural Studies." CLCWeb:
Comparative Literature and Culture (Library) (1999–)
Boruszko, Graciela, and Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek, eds. New Work
about World Literatures. Special Issue CLCWeb: Comparative
Literature and Culture 15.6 (2013)
Casanova, Pascale. The World Republic of Letters. Trans. M. B.
DeBevoise. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004.
D'haen, Theo. The Routledge Concise History of World Literature.
London: Routledge, 2011.
D'haen, Theo, David Damrosch, and Djelal Kadir, eds. The Routledge
Companion to World Literature. London: Routledge, 2011.
D'haen, Theo, César Domínguez, and Mads Rosendahl Thomsen,
eds. World Literature: A Reader. London: Routledge, 2012.
Damrosch, David. How to Read World Literature. London: Blackwell,
2009.
Damrosch, David. What Is World Literature? Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2003.
Damrosch, David, April Alliston, Marshall Brown, Page duBois,
Sabry Hafez, Ursula K. Heise, Djelal Kadir, David L. Pike, Sheldon
Pollock, Bruce Robbins, Haruo Shirane, Jane Tylus, and Pauline Yu,
eds. The Longman Anthology of World Literature. New York:
Pearson Longman, 2009. 6 Vols.
Davis, Paul, John F. Crawford, Gary Harrison, David M. Johnson,
and Patricia Clark Smith, eds. The Bedford Anthology of World
Literature. New York: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2004. 6 Vols.
Goßens, Peter. Weltliteratur. Modelle transnationaler
Literaturwahrnehmung im 19. Jahrhundert. Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler,
2011.
Hashmi, Alamgir. The Commonwealth, Comparative Literature, and
the World. Islamabad: Indus Books, 1988.
Juvan, Marko, ed. World Literatures from the Nineteenth to the
Twenty-first Century. Special Issue CLCWeb: Comparative Literature
and Culture 15.5 (2013)
Lawall, Sarah, ed. Reading World Literature: Theory, History, Practice.
Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994.
Pizer, John. The Idea of World Literature: History and Pedagogical
Practice. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006.
Prendergast, Christopher, ed. Debating World Literature. London:
Verso, 2004.
Puchner, Martin, Suzanne Conklin Akbari, Wiebke Denecke, Vinay
Dharwadker, Barbara Fuchs, Caroline Levine, Sarah Lawall, Pericles
Lewis, and Emily Wilson, eds. The Norton Anthology of World
Literature. New York: W.W. Norton, 2012. 6 Vols.
Rothenberg, Jerome, and Pierre Joris, eds. Poems for the
Millennium: A Global Anthology. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1998. 2 Vols.
Sturm-Trigonakis, Elke. Comparative Cultural Studies and the New
Weltliteratur. West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2013.
Tanoukhi, Nirvana. "The Scale of World Literature". New Literary
History 39.3 (2008).
Thomsen, Mads Rosendahl. Mapping World Literature: International
Canonization and Transnational Literatures. London: Continuum,
2008.
Tötösy de Zepetnek, Steven, and Tutun Mukherjee, eds. Companion
to Comparative Literature, World Literatures, and Comparative
Cultural Studies. New Delhi: Cambridge University Press India,
2013.
Vipper, Yuri B. A Fundamental Study of the History of World
Literature. USSR Academy of Sciences: Social Sciences Vol. XVI,
 No. 1, 1985 pp. 84–93.
Vipper, Yuri B. National Literary History in History of World Literature:
Theoretical Principles of Treatment. New Literary History Vol. 16,
No. 3, On Writing Histories of Literature (Spring, 1985),
pp. 545–558.

External linksEdit