The Routledge Concise History of World Literature

Theo D'haen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136635700
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This remarkably broad and informative book offers an introduction to and overview of World Literature. Tracing the term from its earliest roots and situating it within a number of relevant contexts from postcolonialism to postmodernism, Theo D'haen examines:

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• the return of the term "world literature" and its changing meaning
• Goethe's concept of Weltliteratur and how this relates to current debates
• theories and theorists who have had an impact on world literature
• non-canonical and less-known literatures from around the globe
• the possibility and implications of a definition of world literature.

This book is the ideal guide to an increasingly popular and important term in literary studies. It is accessible and engaging and will be invaluable to students of world literature, comparative literature, translation and postcolonial studies and anyone with an interest in these or related topics.

1 Naming World Literature

Overview

In this first chapter we take a look at how “world literature” got its name, and at some of the fluctuations that name, and the idea or ideas it has stood for, have undergone over the past two centuries or so. Put at its simplest, we see the story of world literature coming full circle over these two centuries, with the more recent and most influential commentators adopting a position that is close to that of the man who first made the term popular. That man was the German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832). Untils recently it has been commonplace to assert that he coined the term “Weltliteratur.” We now know that this is not correct. August Ludwig von Schlözer (1735–1809), a German historian who also wrote a world history, already used the term in print in his 1773 Isländischen Literatur und Geschichte (Icelandic Literature and History; Schamoni 2008, Gossens in press). Yet another German, the writer Christoph Martin Wieland (1733–1813), certainly used it early in the nineteenth century in a handwritten note to a translation of Horace’s letters (Weitz 1987, Pizer 2006). However, none of these earlier uses has had the impact that Goethe’s has had. Goethe first recorded the term in his diary on 15 January 1827. In his Gespräche mit Goethe (1836–48; Conversations with Goethe) Johann Peter Eckermann (1792–1854) notes Goethe on 31 January of the same year as saying that “national literature has not much meaning nowadays: the epoch of world literature is at hand, and each must work to hasten its coming” (Strich 1949: 349), and he would regularly return to Weltliteratur over the next 4 years, almost up to his death in 1832. In all, we have twenty-one rather brief passages from Goethe’s own writings and his recorded conversation in which the term appears (Strich 1957: 369–72, 1949: 349–51).Ever since the publication of Conversations with Goethe, these passages have served as the inevitable point of departure for all further discussions on the topic. Yet nowhere in his voluminous writings does Goethe give a precise definition of Weltliteratur. In fact, Hendrik Birus (2000) details the notorious ambiguity or polysemy of Goethe’s utterances on world literature. It is not surprising, then, that these utterances have given rise to ambiguities. These ambiguities, moreover, largely stem from Goethe’s own historical situation. In what follows we enter into the twists and turns these ambiguities have led to with regard to “world literature.”

Goethe’s Weltliteratur

At the time of Goethe’s taking an interest in Weltliteratur Europe had only relatively recently emerged from a period of violent warfare occasioned by the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. Goethe had himself been actively involved in some of these events. Germany at the time was divided into numerous smaller, and a few larger, kingdoms, principalities, duchies, and the like. For the better part of his adult life, Goethe had been living in Weimar at the court of the Dukes of Saxe-Weimar. After the final defeat of Napoleon in 1815 Europe had entered into a period of pacification and political restoration. Goethe noted that under these circumstances an increase in the production and circulation of periodicals facilitated the exchange of ideas across Europe. In his own journal Über Kunst und Altertum (On Art and Antiquity Vol. 6, part 1), in an 1827 article on a French adaptation of his own play Tasso, he commented upon this as a sign of “the progress of the human race, of the wider prospects in world relationships between men,” and it led him to the “conviction that a universal world literature is in process of formation in which we Germans are called to play an honourable part” (Strich 1949: 349). In an 1828 issue of Über Kunst und Altertum (On Art and Antiquity, Vol. 6, part 2), in an article on “Edinburgh Reviews,” he elaborated: “these journals, as they gradually reach a wider public, will contribute most effectively to the universal world literature we hope for; we repeat however that there can be no question of the nations thinking alike, the aim is simply that they shall grow aware of one another, understand each other, and, even where they may not be able to love, may at least tolerate one another” (Strich 1949: 350). The “honourable part” Goethe saw reserved for the German language and its literature lay in German literature mediating between the world’s literatures because of what he esteemed to be the German language’s unique gift for translation. This, Goethe thought, would also enhance the prestige and standing of German literature in a Europe in which, contrary to the English and French cases, German literature did not enjoy the support of a strong nation state, and could not invoke a robust national identity. Through the use of the German language, then, and with German literature acting as a sort of arbiter for the dissemination of work in foreign languages throughout Europe, a transnational literature would come into being that would serve the cause of understanding and toleration among nations and peoples.

Weltliteratur, “Letters” and Literature

In an address to the Congress of Natural Scientists in Berlin, in 1828, Goethe further refined his earlier ideas. “In venturing to announce a European, in fact a universal, world literature,” he said, “we did not mean merely to say that the different nations should get to know each other and each other’s productions; for in this sense it has long been in existence, is propagating itself, and is constantly being added to” (Strich 1949: 350). “No, indeed! The matter is rather this,” he claimed, “that the living, striving men of letters should learn to know each other, and through their own inclination and similarity of tastes, find the motive for corporate action” (Strich 1949: 350). In the original German, Goethe uses “Literatoren,” which is a rather neutral term. Goethe’s translator’s use of the term “men of letters” in this passage, though, accurately points to the double frame of reference Goethe seems to invoke here, and hence perhaps to his own final indecision as to what precisely he meant with Weltliteratur.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) is generally accepted as having been the greatest German writer ever. He gained fame very early with a tragedy, Götz von Berlichingen (1773), and especially with his 1774 epistolary novel The Sorrows of Young Werther (Die Leiden des jungen Werthers) about an unhappy love affair that had all of Europe in tears. Other important works include the drama’s Faust I and II (1808, 1832), the two-part novel of education Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, 1795–96) and Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years (Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre, 1829), and the volume of poems West-Eastern Divan (West-Östlicher Diwan, 1819), inspired by the poetry of the fourteenth-century Persian poet Hafez or Hafiz. Next to the most important German, and many would say European or even world, writer of his age, Goethe was also a noted scientist. His novel Elective Affinities (Die Wahlverwandtschaften, 1809) looks at marriage, and the relationships between men and women, as analogous to chemical reactions. Goethe also was active as a geologist and botanist, and he elaborated a theory of colors that drew a lot of attention at the time.

On the one hand, the term “men of letters” suggests that Goethe, while thinking of Weltliteratur, may have been harking back to the concept, pre-dating the French Revolution, of the “Republic of Letters.” This term refers to the communities of intellectuals, writers, and philosophers that during especially the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries kept in touch with one another, across Europe, by the exchange of, precisely, letters. What they corresponded about, more importantly, were “letters” in the sense of any writing about any kind of “knowledge,” stretching from poetry to politics, from astronomy to astrology. The impact these writers had can best be gauged from the fact that it is their ideas, especially those of the so-called lumières or Enlightenment philosophers of the eighteenth century, that led to the French Revolution. In fact, they acted as a kind of independent “republic” next to, and often in disagreement with, the official state powers across Europe. In Goethe’s day, periodicals had replaced letter writing as the main medium of intellectual exchange. The men writing and reading these journals in Goethe’s view should assume the mantle of their earlier counterparts of the Republic of Letters, and strive for the same impact. Weltliteratur would then refer to an updated form of transnational communication among, in first instance, European, and in further instance “world,” intellectuals, to use a term that in Goethe’s days had not yet been coined.

Alternatively, the use of such a term as “men of letters” also hints at Goethe’s unease with what he saw as unwelcome developments in his already increasingly “modern” and commercialized world, of which the enhanced circulation of journals and peridodicals was in itself a telling instance. In an 1829 essay on a German translation of Thomas Carlyle’s Life of Schiller, and after having mentioned the inevitability of the coming of world literature, Goethe writes that “what suits the masses will spread and will, as we can already see now, give pleasure far and wide … but what is really worth-while will not be so popular” (Strich 1949: 25). So, “the serious-minded will form a quiet, I might almost say an oppressed community,” and find their main consolation, “in fact the greatest encouragement” in the fact that “Truth has its function and performs it … if they discover this for themselves and can point it out to others, they will have a profound effect on their generation” (Strich 1949: 25; for a slightly different version of the same passage see Goethe, ed. John Gearey 1986: 227).

Weltliteratur here assumes the double guise of on the one hand signaling, positively, the intimate “commerce” or exchange of ideas between like-minded writers around Europe and on the other hand, negatively, that of the everfaster and ever-increasing commercialization, including in the province of “letters,” that Goethe saw taking place all around him. Later ages would rephrase this distinction as the opposition between Literatur and Lektur, or Unterhaltungsliteratur (Schneider 2004), that is to say between literature and popular literature. Goethe’s aversion to the latter would eventually translate into the rejection of mass culture by, for instance, Theodor Adorno (1903–69) and most of the Frankfurt School, as well as their American followers, foremost Fredric Jameson.

The “commercial” reference of Weltliteratur is picked up by Karl Marx (1818–83) and Friedrich Engels (1820–95) in their Communist Manifesto (1848), where they posited 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. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal interdependence of nations. 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 increasingly impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature” (Marx 2010:16). In essence, the opposition between these two concepts of “world literature” – the one referring to the circulation of what are in essence “high” cultural goods among an international elite of “connaisseurs,” the other embracing all works of literature everywhere – keeps running through the subject’s further history.

The use of the word “literature” in the final sentence of the previous paragraph points to a further ambiguity in Goethe’s various pronouncements on world literature, namely that related to the uses of “letters” and “literature.” Discussion of Goethe’s Weltliteratur almost from the very beginning became caught up in a more general discussion about the concept of “literature” raging at the beginning of the nineteenth century (Hoesel-Uhlig 2004). In fact it is only at that moment that “literature” gained its present meaning, at least as used in Europe and by extension in the West, or in Western-inspired thinking on the issue. Until the end of the eighteenth century it was “letters” that covered all forms of written knowledge. At the end of the eighteenth century, largely as a result of the German philosopher Emmanuel Kant’s intervention, “literature” comes to designate only that part of the overall mass of written material that is ruled by the aesthetic sense, or “taste,” and not by any objectively verifiable claim to “truth.” Implicitly, the question then shifts to what is “good” literature and what is not. Goethe’s own unease with Weltliteratur in his 1829 essay on Carlyle’s The Life of Schiller quoted above as possibly designating all “literature” regardless of “quality” reflects this shift. At the same time, the rise of literary historiography as a branch of the newly emerging “science” of history at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries redirected attention to “literature” as the archive of everything ever written that fits the category of literature newly defined. Consequently, after Goethe the interpretations put on Weltliteratur have mostly tended to vacillate between the aesthetic and the archival, between an exclusive canon of what is deemed aesthetically most valuable in, and as comprehensive a coverage as possible of, “all” literature. Only recently has there been a return to Goethe’s original concept of Weltliteratur as a form of circulation – albeit, of course, with a difference.

World Literature Versus National Literature

At first sight the greatest ambiguity of all is that Goethe pushed the idea of world literature in an age of intense nationalism. In Germany as in the rest of Europe, and later also in the Americas, during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries most effort would go into the writing of national literary histories. This was the logical cultural counterpart to the relentless process of political nation-building or consolidation going on across Europe. According to the tenets of Romanticism, each nation strove to ground its legitimacy in its own literary antecedents. Consequently, we see the first systematic histories of Europe’s various national literatures appearing in the first part of the nineteenth century. This is not to say that there had been no earlier national literary histories. Italy, until beyond the middle of the nineteenth century, remained subdivided into a motley quilt of larger and smaller political entities, with no hope of political unification in sight. The unity of a political “patria” or “fatherland” thus lacking was looked for in literature, and particularly in what Claudio Guillén (1993: 27) calls a “common poetic patrimony.” Guillén cites Giaconto Gimmá’s Idea della storia dell’Italia letterata (1723; The Idea of the History of Literary Italy) and Marco Foscarini’s Storia della letteratura veneziana (1752; History of Venetian Literature) as the earliest examples of such histories. In France a multivolume Histoire littéraire de la France (Literary History of France) started appearing in 1733. The latter, an encyclopedia rather than a proper “history,” was inaugurated by the Benedictine monks of Saint Maur, continued by the Institut de France in 1814, and still later by a French academy, and continues until today. Invoking the authority of the Histoire of the Benedictines, next to that of, for instance, the French sixteenth-century writer and philosopher Michel de Montaigne, the early nineteenth-century author René de Chateaubriand, and others, Matthieu Richard Auguste Henrion (1805–62) published a one-volume Histoire littéraire de la France au moyen âge (Literary History of France During the Middle Ages) in 1827, with a second edition in 1837. In his foreword Henrion justifies his enterprise by saying that whereas French youth in the course of their studies are familiarized with Greek and Latin letters, they remain strangers to the various phases of “our country’s civilisation” (1827: i; civilisation de notre pays). Similarly, he claims, whereas “the better kind of people” (les gens du monde) are well up on matters political, they “barely know anything about our literary history” (Henrion 1827: i; connaissent à peine notre histoire littéraire). The very first pages of Henrion’s Histoire set the tone for much of what is typical of nineteenth-century national literary historiography. He immediately starts by claiming for French literature the succession to the giants of Greek and Latin literature. In a similar vein, albeit perhaps not always with the same aplomb, all national literary histories glorified their own literature. Henrion qualifies his work as an “Essai,” “sufficiently brief not to lay claim to the attention for too long, yet sufficiently thorough to cover all essentials” (Henrion 1827: i; assez rapide pour ne pas détourner trop long-temps l’attention, assez détaillé pour qu’il renfermât les notions les plus essentielles).

The Geschichte der poetischen Nationallitteratur der Deutschen (1835–42, 5 vols; History of the National Literature of the Germans) by Georg Gottfried Gervinus (1805–71) is a totally different affair in its comprehensiveness as well as thoroughness. Not for nothing does Michael S. Batts choose the date of appearance of the first volume of Gervinus’s history (as of the fifth edition, by Karl Bartsch, renamed Geschichte der deutschen Dichtung, 1871–74; History of German Literature) as the starting date for his own A History of Histories of German Literature, 1835–1914 (1993). For Batts, Gervinus’s Geschichte is “quite different from anything that had appeared before and [ … ] set a standard for the future” (Batts 1993: 1). In fact, Batts situates Gervinus’s work as at the start of “Germanistik,” that is to say the academic discipline of the study of German language and literature. Most other, at least Western, European countries followed suit in the course of the nineteenth century. In Holland, for instance, we have W.J.A. Jonckbloet’s (1817–85) multivolume Geschiedenis der Nederlandsche letterkunde (1868–70; History of Dutch Literature). Although, as we briefly saw earlier, Goethe himself wanted to propagate world literature at least partially because he thought that German letters would be enhanced if they should succeed in playing a central role in the circulation of the world’s literatures, and because in this way the relative inconsequence of the numerous but mostly small German entities in the political realm would be at least partially offset by the increased weight of German literature in the cultural realm, his aims in all this were cosmopolitan rather than narrowly nationalistic. In fact, for at least a number of commentators Goethe would have insisted upon his ideas on world literature in reaction to what he perceived as the narrowly patriotic concerns of his Romantic coevals. Perhaps it is more correct to say that he did so in a limited “window of opportunity,” when Europe was still in recoil from the excesses of the Napoleonic period, and before the onset of the nationalist movements that would erupt across Europe as of about 1830, with ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The (re)turn of world literature
• 1. Naming world literature
• 2. Goethe’s Weltliteratur and the humanist ideal
• 3. World literature and comparative literature
• 4. World literature as an American pedagogical construct
• 5. World literature as system
• 6. World literature and translation
• 7. World literature, (post)modernism, (post)colonialism, littérature-monde
• 8. World literature and the literatures of the world
• Guide to further reading
• Bibliography
• Index