What Is World Literature

Reviews 128
DOI: 10.2478/abcsj-2019-0009
American, British and Canadian Studies, Volume 32, June 2019
David Damrosch, What Is World Literature? Princeton & Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 2003. (£18.95 Hb.). Pp 324. ISBN
9780691049861.
Eminent professor at Harvard University, David Damrosch resumed, in

his 2003 study What Is World Literature?, a problem that was first raised
by Goethe: the problem of world literature. According to Damrosch, at the
beginning of the twenty-first century, the problem can be formulated in
the following terms: “Which literature, whose world? What relation to the
national literatures whose production continued unabated even after
Goethe announced their obsolescence? What new relations between
Western Europe and the rest of the globe, between antiquity and
modernity, between the nascent mass culture and elite production?” (1).
Damrosch traces the evolution of this literary discipline, preparing the
reader for a new intersectional approach: “the foreign reader is likely to
impose domestic literary values on the foreign work” (4). The quest for
this new approach begins with a refusal of the old denomination of
“universal literature”. In its wide pretended meaning, “universal
literature” does not exist. In fact, “the ‘universal’ is only a cover for an
unconscious process of assimilation to one’s own prior values” (138).
Enjoying worldwide reception involves being subject to certain
disquieting transformative operations. “All works are subject to
manipulation and even deformation in their foreign reception” (24). The
arguments brought by Damrosch are compelling. World literature should
not be regarded only from the centres of power (of both the literary and
the real world), but also from the margins. World literature is the result of
give-and-take operations where all sides introduce their own cultural and
ideological agendas. Damrosch concludes that world literature is “always
as much about the host culture’s values and needs as it is about a work’s
source culture” (283), i.e., an interactive, dynamic exchange.
For the Romanian reader, be s/he professional or not, some of
Damrosch’s comments may irritate open wounds. “The writer from a
marginal culture is in a double bind. With little to go on at home, a young
129 Reviews
writer can only achieve greatness by emulating foreign models ... yet these
models can have a crushing weight” (9). As a Romanian reader, I am not
very sure if “little is going on at home” but I agree that often we only take
into account what is going on at home if foreign models reinforce or
parallel the domestic evolutions. A huge problem for Romanian literature
and its servants is that Romanian literary works, Romanian literary
criticism enjoy little notoriety. Damrosch is sincere and entertains no
illusions regarding the disinterested nature of the translation project.
“Even today, foreign works will rarely be translated at all in the United
States, much less widely distributed, unless they reflect American
concerns and fit comfortably with American images of the foreign culture
in question” (Damrosch 18).
Working in the context of one of the great literay powers of the
worldi, David Damrosch realizes that the solipsistic perspective that has
dominated literary studies in the most influential literary zones, the so-
called literary First World needs to change. He finds the solution in the
circulation of the literary text, namely in reception studies, as a necessary,
inevitable component of literary studies and world literature. In
Damrosch’ s own words, the study of any literary text should also include
“the ways the [literary] work becomes reframed in its translations and in
its new cultural contexts” (24).
After this strong argument, Damrosch gives several examples how
translation and reception studies can offer a richer perspective on world
literature. This new approach is justified by the globalization of our
civilization. It is obvious that the internet pushes us farther and farther
towards a planetary culture where national differences become
local(izing) differences.
The new perspective is actually metaphorically announced by the
Nahuatl poetry quoted by Damrosch in an ample chapter on the
interaction between the conquered and the conquerors after the fall of the
Aztec Empire. Nothing dies completely, there is only transformation over
transformation. The meek, the defeated are more awares, in this respect,
because for them this is a strategy to avoid cultural extinction.
“So let us now rejoice within our hearts,

American, British and Canadian Studies / 130
all who are on earth;

only briefly do we know one another,
only here are we together.
So do not be saddened, my lords:
no one, no one is left behind on earth.” (98)
Damrosch explores an impressive variety of texts: ancient Egyptian

poetry, the epic of Gilgamesh, Dante, Nahuatl poetry after the Spanish
conquest of the Aztec Empire, the mystic literature produced by Metchild
von Magdeburg, Kafka, P.G. Wodehouse, the autobiography constructed
by Rigoberta Menchuii alone or with her editors. In time, reception makes
Dante’s poetry change both inside Italy and when it is translated (140).
From Central and Eastern Europe, a literary space often neglected in the
great Western literary syntheses, Damrosch chooses Milorad Pavic’s
Dictionary of the Khazars. Reception thus becomes part of the analytical
literary practice, not something that is studied after some kind of
apparently neutral close reading. When we say close, we mean closing
upon the national borders.
The introduction of “the shifting lens of translation” (169) is
necessary and even inevitable. “The study of world literature should
embrace translation far more actively than it has usually done to date”
(289). David Damrosch gives a very good definition of the translator’s
work, the site of a real balance between cultures and languages. The
translator must “understand the work effectively in its new cultural or
theoretical context while at the same time getting it right in a fundamental
way with reference to the source culture” (288).
The conclusion after these multiple comparative exercises is that
world literature can be viewed as “an elliptical refraction of national
literatures, a mode of reading, writing that gains in translation” (283).
Arguments come in waves and in exquisite wording: “texts come to us
mediated by existing frameworks of reception and interpretation” (295).
We all have to be aware of these mediating frames. In other words, world
literature should also study “the ways in which a literary text reaches out
and away from its point of origin” (300). David Damrosch has the merit of
finding a very adequate trope for the exchange that, ultimately, forms the
basis of world literature: “an elliptical refraction”.
131 Reviews
A Romanian reader can only agree with this new viewpoint, with
one minor major amendment. In Romanian cultural tradition, the
recognition of the importance of translation, this “heroic interpretative
leap” (293) over the “abyss between languages” is not something new.
Translators have been included in important reference works at least since
1979. See, for instance, Dicţionarul literaturii române de la origini până
la 1900, compiled in 1979iii, the dictionaries of Romanian literature
compiled by Eugen Simion, the Zaciu, Papahagi, the Aurel Sasu team, or
by Aurel Sasu alone, the chronological dictionaries of the Romanian
novel, the chronological dictionaries of the foreign novel in Romanian
translation. It is obvious that a minor literature, such as the Romanian one,
is less solipsistic than the literatures emerging from the great centers of
cultural power. Consequently, the refraction view has existed in certain
national contexts long before globalization became a slogan. And
Romanian researchers were not the only ones eager to embrace the
national and the international in the same handshake. In 1991 Huck
Gutman compiled a very interesting collection of international
perspectives on American literature valorizing the work of foreign
Americanists. The element of novelty the study by David Damrosch
brings is the awareness of this exchange from Harvard.
MIHAELA MUDURE,
Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
Notes:
i
We use here the terminology of Pascale Casanova as formulated in her study La
République Mondiale des Lettres. David Damrosch criticizes Casanova for being
too grounded in the French tradition in her demonstration (cf. 27). In our
opinion the two studies converge in their effort to understand how power works
in the literary field that is not only a quest for aesthetic values but also a toil to
reach the respectability given by power.
ii
Mayan militant for the rights of indigenous peoples in Guatemala and all over
the world. She was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1992.
iii
The Dictionary of Romanian literature since its origins to 1900.
Reviews 132
Works Cited
***. Dicţionarul cronologic al romanului românesc de la origini până la 1989.

Ed. Ion Istrate. Bucureşti: Editura Academiei Române, 2004.
***. Dicţionarul cronologic al romanului românesc (1990-2000). Coordinator :
Ion Istrate. Bucureşti: Editura Academiei Române, 2011.
***. Dicţionarul cronologic al romanului tradus în România 1990-2000. Cluj-
Napoca: Editura Academiei Române, 2017.
***. Dicţionarul cronologic al romanului tradus în România de la origini până la
1989. Bucureşti: Editura Academiei Române, 2005.
***. Dicţionarul general al literaturii române. Ed. Eugen Simion. Bucureşti:
Universul Enciclopedic, 2004-2009.
***. Dicţionarul literaturii române de la origini până la 1900. Bucureşti: Editura
Academiei Republicii Socialiste România, 1979.
Casanova, Pascale. La République Mondiale des Lettres. Paris: Seuil, 1999.
Gutman, Huck, ed. As Others Read Us: International Perspectives on American
Literature. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1991.
Sasu, Aurel. Dicţionarul biografic al scriitorilor români. Piteşti: Editura Paralela
45, 2006.
Zaciu, Mircea, Marian Papahagi, and Aurel Sasu. Dicţionarul esenţial al
scriitorilor români. Bucureşti: Albatros, 2000.

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Reviews 128

David Damrosch, What Is World Literature? Princeton & Oxford:

Eminent professor at Harvard University, David Damrosch resumed, in

“So let us now rejoice within our hearts,

all who are on earth;

Damrosch explores an impressive variety of texts: ancient Egyptian

***. Dicţionarul cronologic al romanului românesc de la origini până la 1989.

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