Survey of world literature

EnLaL 3071
Chapter I: World Literature Defined
• Controversies in definition.
• World literature begins with Goethe.
• The term world literature itself derives from
Goethe’s neologism Weltliteratur, recorded by
Johann Peter Eckermann.
• World literature is now a commonplace in
English, although it remains a matter of
debate.
 …
• Goethe refers to the connections between the
Chinese text he has read and his own Hermann
and Dorothea as well as the novels of Richardson
and the Chansons de Béranger.
• He had not studies literature- he read the
translation of the Chinese work.
• Goethe is suggesting what world literature does.
• Goethe’s reading of the Chinese text articulates a
reading practice for world literature.
 …
• What comes before Goethe’s reading of the Chinese
text—the process of its selection, translation,
publication, and distribution—is inseparable from that
reading rather, the process by which the text reached
Goethe is also implicated.
• The Germans were relatively late in literary
developments in Europe.
• Chinese texts were old enough when the Germans
were “still living in the woods”- before the arrival and
adoption of the European genre of the novel in China.
 The question remains: which world and
which literature?
• Damrosch has argued: The survey of world
literature can never cover the world.
• We do better if we seek to uncover a variety of
compelling works from distinctive traditions,
through creative combinations and
juxtapositions guided by whatever specific
themes and issues we wish to raise in a
particular course.
 Now definition
• Damrosch has set out the most commonly
used designation of world literature at the
moment:
“World literature encompasses all literary works
that circulate beyond their culture of origin, either
in translation or in their original language”.
• Thus for Damrosch, world literature is not all
the literature of all the world but only that
literature which crosses a border.
 …
• World literature does not just simply happen, then.
• Or, to use the formulation of Vilashini Cooppan,
“World literature is not an ontology but an
epistemology, not a known but a knowing”.
• As scholars and teachers of world literature, we
need to interrogate not only what is known but also
the ways in which what is available for knowing
becomes available to us, a process inextricably
linked in a feedback loop with our ways of knowing.
 Chapter II: The Four Genealogies of “World Literature”

• The Philological Genealogy

• This philological genealogy of “world literature” was introduced in the
United States at the end of the 19th century thanks to Hutcheson
Macaulay Posnett.
• The first of these genealogies, known as philological, is formed in the
relationships Goethe envisioned between “world literature” and
translation.
• The philological genealogy of the notion is derived from the preoccupation
with what the literary works mean, from the initial concern of respecting
the authentic meaning of the texts, their words as much as their spirit.
• It is accompanied by a very close attention to language, or languages; it
measures the aesthetic experience of the literary works according to a
linguistic experience.
 .
• The Critical Genealogy
• This critical dimension attached to Weltliteratur evolved from 1827 to
1832.
• it is necessary to consider another genealogy of world literature, which
also will lead us to the threshold of engaged thoughts at the end of the
20th century.
• It becomes a geographically (and culturally) situated literature, with a
certain timeless beauty.
• The birth of this critical genealogy of “world literature” took place
under the dual auspices of the challenge of the national scale and of
the elitist adhesion to a very normative definition of literature (a
definition that excluded productions considered commercial or
popular).
 .
• This critical genealogy of “world literature”—in both its versions:
anti-nationalist and elitist—is used in the intellectual field of
aesthetic reflection.
• Very early, this genealogy would know another re-appropriation,
more directly political, under the aegis of Marxism.
• “World literature,” from the Manifesto of the Communist Party
on, becomes in effect a critical lever of primary importance.
• Not as a corpus whose bourgeois ideology must be denounced,
nor as a resource for social criticism, but as an indicator of the
development of power struggles between the bourgeoisie and
the proletariat.
 .
• “World literature,” according to Marx and Engels, is
a tremendous thing, in the sense that its
emergence signals the globalization of the
bourgeoisie, the consolidation of its economic
expansion in the cultural domain.
• However, for them, this globalization is the
condition of a globalization of the proletariat, such
that “world literature” announces and calls for, in a
dialectical reversal, the proletarian revolution itself.
 .
• The Pedagogical Genealogy
• Goethe indirectly laid the foundation for this genealogy when he
conceived of Weltliteratur as a conversation between living
writers who would discuss their works and respective literatures.
• “World literature,” thus conceived, coincides with an
international artistic emulation.
• Moreover, it contributes to the creation of taste for each of the
literary cultures involved.
• In sum, it is akin to the mutual education of writers.
• As one might guess, it is the pedagogical genealogy of “world
literature” that operates in such a context.
 .
• “World literature” is made to serve an educational project: it is in
reading certain works that we can appreciate the aesthetic
pleasure of the text and better understand the foundations of the
“civilization” of which we are a part; in order to perform such a
reading, we have to be taught how to do so.
• “World literature” here serves at once as an apprenticeship and
an inculcation, an education of taste and a discipline of values.
• The pedagogical genealogy from then on flirts with propaganda
and falls into it completely in the 1930s in the Soviet Union, when
Karl Radek distinguishes between a “bourgeois world literature”
and a “proletarian world literature” at the first Soviet Writers
Congress in 1934.
 .
• The Methodological Genealogy
• For the Methodological geneology “world literature” is related to a
thought experiment.
• The rational fiction of “world literature”—as a political aspiration,
intellectual goal, critical project—allows them to imagine the type of
revitalization their conceptual tools would need in order to make this
type of fiction thinkable.
• In all the cases, “world literature” is not so much an object, but a
challenge—a challenge that demands a radical, epistemological litmus
test of literary studies.
• In this sense, “world literature” designates everything our interpretive
habits do not incorporate: neglected languages, forgotten works, and
silent cultures.
 .
• “World literature” is merged with an attempt to
symbolically restore or repair—an attempt that knows it is
condemned from the start, by the vastness of its task, but
that demands, by its very intention, a certain form of
aesthetic or cultural justice.
• In postcolonial studies and in critical theory, the term
subaltern designates and identifies the colonial populations
who are socially, politically, and geographically excluded
from the hierarchy of power of an imperial colony and from
the metropolitan homeland of an empire.
•
 Assignment
• Briefly analyse your novel from one of the
aspects of world literature genealogies.
• Philological analysis as Reflected in the
Novel----------------------------------------
 Chapter III: Literary periods
• Classical: The period between 1200-455 BC
• Medieval period- 5th to 15th c
• Renaissance and reformation 1400-1660
– Elizabeth period- 1558-1603
• Works of Shakespeare
• The Romantic period- 1790-1830
 Classical period

– It is the period between 1200-455 BC.

– Homer’s Illiad and Odyssey
– Classical Greek period- 800-200 BC
• Athenian playwrights
– Classical Roman period- 200 BC-455
• Platus and Horace
• It is the fuse of the idea of Plato and Aristotle,
the classical humanist’s idea of form and
content.
 Classical Period
• Poetics traced the origin of poetry to the natural urge in
man to imitate and the sense of pleasure he derives from
imitation.
• Painful human experiences may also be pleasurable when
watched on stage or read in the works of literature.
• Plato believed in the wisdom contained in classical
philosophy and literature for the moral development of
the individual.
• It is based on the opinion of the classical virtue and
philosophical beliefs of the Greeks.
 THE MEDIEVAL ERA IN ENGLAND
• „The Dark Ages‟ is a term used to describe the
medieval era in European history from 476 –
1066 AD.
• The word, „medieval‟, is from the Latin
language and it means, “middle age‟.
• The medieval period had a rich intellectual
environment made up of many writers and
creative works, some of which are still being
referred to today.
 Characteristics of the Medieval Period
• The medieval era emphasized religion and most of
its writings revolved around God and morality.
• Much attention was also placed on values and the
practice of good works, and the individual
conscientiously adheres to these values.
• The attainment of Heaven was the ultimate goal, as
the literary works of English medieval period show.
• The writings were anonymous, that is, no names
were ascribed to individual works.
 WHAT IS RENAISSANCE?
• Renaissance means “rebirth”, it came
immediately after the Middle Ages, fall of
Rome, by the 16th century.
• A cultural movement was that profoundly
affected European intellectual life in the early
modern period.
• The Renaissance was a movement dedicated to
the rediscovery and use of classical learning.
 Features of Renaissance:
• Realism and expressionism – Realism is the
general attempt to depict things accurately,
from either a visual, social or emotional
perspective.
• Humanism is another feature of Renaissance.
Humanism is devoted to the study of mankind,
instead of the theological devotion of the
Middle Age.
 …
• It glorified the individual and approved worldly
pleasures, viewing life as worthwhile for its own
sake, not chiefly as a preparation for the life to
come.
• It focused attention upon secular society rather
than the medieval preoccupation with the
church and religious affairs.
• It featured great achievements in literature, art,
and science.
 THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT
• The Romantic period was characterized as Neo-
classical period.
• The writers of the period canvassed a reaction against
some unnecessary rules.
• Romantic poets are the six male poets: William Blake,
William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy
Shelley and John Keats.
• In Neo-classical features, many of the Romantic works
reacted to the growth of industrialization which had
eroded the rustic way of living in England.
 Characteristics of the Romantic age:

• affirm the creative powers of the imagination.

• introduce a new way of looking at nature.
• explain human society and its development in
terms of an organic model,
• poets write about the nature of the individual
self and the value of individual experience.
• shows a high regard for the figure of the artist.
 Realism

• Realism, an artistic movement that began in

France in the 1850s, rejected Romanticism,
seeking instead to portray contemporary
subjects and situations with truth and accuracy
than art and imagination.
• Broadly defined as "the faithful representation
of reality" or "verisimilitude," realism is a
literary technique practiced by many schools of
writing.
 Characteristics
• Realists revolted against the exotic subject matter and
exaggerated emotionalism of the Romanticism that had
dominated French literature and art since the late 18th
century.
• Works of realism depicted people of all classes in ordinary
life situations, which often reflected the changes brought
on by the Industrial and Commercial Revolutions.
• Important figures in the Realist art movement were
Gustave Courbet, Honore Daumier, and Jean-Francois
Millet.
 Magical Realism
• Magical realism is one of the most unique literary movements of the last
century. While most commonly associated with Latin American authors,
writers from all over the world have made big contributions to the genre.
• Magical realism is a genre of literature that depicts the real world as having
a nuance of magic or fantasy. Magical realism is a part of the realism genre.
• Within a work of magical realism, the world is still grounded in the real
world, but fantastical elements are considered normal in this world. Like
fairy tales, magical realism novels and short stories blur the line between
fantasy and reality.
• The genre grew in popularity in parts of the world like Latin America that
were economically oppressed and exploited by Western countries. Magic
realist writers used the genre to express their distaste and critique toward
American Imperialism.
 Characteristics of Magical Realism

• Realistic setting. All magical realism novels

take place in a setting in this world that’s
familiar to the reader.
• Magical elements. From talking objects to
bringing dead characters to common sense,
every magical realism story has fantastical
elements that do not occur in our world.
However, they’re presented as normal within
the novel.
 …
• Critique. Authors often use magical realism to offer an
implicit critique of society, most notably politics and the
elite.
• Unique plot structure. Magical realism does not follow a
typical narrative arc with a clear beginning, middle, and
end like other literary genres. This makes for a more
intense reading experience, as the reader does not know
when the plot will advance or when the conflict will take
place.
• Ex. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García
Márquez (1967)