As early as the 1820s, Johann Wolfgang Goethe declared that the epoch of world literature is at hand, and thus everyone must strive to hasten its approach. At that time, however, this could hardly be anything more than a vision of the future. Comparative literature, which opened up to the world, came into being in the nineteenth century, but it has not been able to escape from its Eurocentric limitations. It was challenged and questioned in its development in the twentieth century. Having been shaped more recently by critical theories, it has also moved increasingly away from literature itself, and this is perhaps another reason why it has fallen into an identity crisis as a scholarly discipline. The rise of world literature today may be seen as a response to the crisis in literary studies . Such a paradigmatic shift is not only a tendency in the internal development of literary studies, it is also a humanistic response to the increasingly intense racial, class and cultural conflicts we witness in the world today. In such a process, a series of contradictory factors , such as national culture and world ethics, regional experience and global consciousness, state interests and international justice, all tend to form a tension between the local and the universal. Therefore, the question of how we may have a firm grasp of that tension and reopen the conceptual richness of the idea of world literature constitutes a core issue in scholarly research today.
In order to explore such a core issue with collective wisdom, the School of Chinese Language and Literature of Beijing Normal University hosted its fourth conference entitled Ideas and Methods: International Dialogue and Forum on October 16–17, 2015. The conference was dedicated to the theme “What Is World Literature? Tension between the Local and the Universal.” Twenty Chinese and foreign scholars, including the two interlocutors in the Dialogue, Prof. David Damrosch and Prof. Zhang Longxi , were invited in order to jointly debate the theory and practice of world literature . This book presents a collection of nearly all contributions to the debate that were delivered during the conference.
World Literature: A Problem, or Not? Some Ideas About World Literature
Since the 1990s, we have encountered an intense theoretical discussion of the concept of “world literature.”1 At present, this term is at the center of an international debate on “global literatures.” And in fact, it experienced a remarkable reception history after Goethe had made it prominent. But since the early 1960s, the term “world literature” has become increasingly a target of criticism, as it was seen as an elitist concept of highbrow literature (often wrongly ascribed to Goethe) that transcends the national frame of reference while being comprehensible only in the context of exactly that frame of reference. “In general,” it has been maintained, “the universal, if it is not just abstraction, can only exist in the local.”2 Today, however, one is more likely to hear scholars speak of literatures of the world. This term is undoubtedly linked to the classical concept of world literature, but it is rooted in entirely different programmatic ideas.
But is that already the anarchically teeming “Tout-Monde” of our times described by the Caribbean poet and cultural theorist Édouard Glissant? “Un monde sans axe et sans visée,”3 a world without a dependable axis and a clear goal? Perhaps it is claimed exactly in this context that there is not only a lack of consensus as to what world literature truly includes, but also as to what it actually is.4 Or, in the words of Franco Moretti , a professor with Italian roots based at Stanford University, world literature “is not an object, it’s a problem.”5
In early 2000, the US literary scholars Franco Moretti (Stanford) and David Damrosch (Harvard) undertook extensive studies on the concept of world literature.6 Moretti’s initial hypothesis that served as a point of departure in his essay “Conjectures on World Literature” (2000) asserted the fact that world literature, as a research object in the framework of comparative studies of literature, has always been a limited undertaking; it is only today that it is forming a global system. And in his essay “Modern European Literature: A Geographical Sketch” (1994), Moretti already asks, “And so, at the very hour of its birth, Goethe’s cultural dream immediately forces a question upon us. Weltliteratur: world literature, human literature? Or the literature of imperialism?”7 Obviously, Moretti’s view of the matter is heavily influenced by theoretical positions particular to postcolonialism. He develops these thoughts in his “Conjectures on World Literature” by comparing world literature to international capitalism:
I will borrow this initial hypothesis from the world-systems school of economic history, for which international capitalism is a system that is simultaneously one and unequal, with a core and a periphery (and a semi-periphery) that are bound together in a relationship of growing inequality . One, and unequal: one literature (Weltliteratur, singular as in Goethe and Marx ), or perhaps, better, one world literary system (of inter-related literatures); but a system which is different from what Goethe and Marx hoped for, because it’s profoundly unequal.8
On the epistemological level, however, his thinking is fundamentally characterized by dichotomies: center and periphery , emitting culture and target culture , and so on; the transfer of knowledge and culture always occurs in just one direction , the works and their authors obviously belong to just one of both cultures; spaces are opposed to each other. As Moretti comprehends it, a world literature with Western Europe as its center does not correspond to the cosmopolitan criteria implied in either Goethe’s view of “Weltliteratur” or that of Marx.9 But it becomes obvious that Moretti comprehends the term in a way that is different from that of Goethe , and in a certain sense also different from that of Marx and Engels . I will come back to these questions later.
It is a well-known hypothesis of Moretti that world literature is not a consequence of globalization; he maintains that it has always existed, though with the eighteenth century as a borderline in the history of world literature. In his essay “Evolution, World-Systems, Weltliteratur” (2006), he deals again with the concept and explains it by choosing an evolutionary perspective:
The term ‘world literature’ has been around for almost two centuries, but we still do not know what world literature is… Perhaps, because we keep collapsing under a single term two distinct world literatures: one that precedes the eighteenth century and one that follows it. The ‘first’ Weltliteratur is a mosaic of separate, ‘local’ cultures; it is characterized by strong internal diversity; it produces new forms mostly by divergence; and is best explained by (some version of) evolutionary theory. […] The ‘second’ Weltliteratur (which I would prefer to call world literary system) is unified by the international literary market; it shows a growing, and at times stunning amount of sameness; its main mechanism of change is convergence; and is best explained by (some version of) world- system analysis.10
Inspired by Fernand Braudel’s longue durée theory and Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-systems theory, Moretti has formed his concept of a “world literary system” and argues that we should study world literature by relying on the theory of evolution and systems theory.
When compared with the rather abstract form of Moretti’s theoretical approach, David Damrosch reveals himself as more complex in his considerations focused on circulation processes of (world) literatur...