World literature

Johann Wolfgang Goethe used the concept of world literature 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. 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. He made a famous statement in January 1827, predicting that world literature would replace national literature as the major mode of literary creativity in the future: 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: Martin Puchner has stated that Goethe had a keen sense of world literature as driven by a new world market in literature. This market-based approach was sought by Marx and Engels in 1848 through their Manifesto document, which was published in four languages and distributed among several European countries, and has since become one of the most influential texts of the twentieth century. Major survey anthologies today, including those published by Longman, Bedford and Norton, showcase several hundred authors from dozens of countries. ==Contemporary understandings==

The explosive growth in the range of cultures studied under the rubric of world literature has inspired a variety of theoretical attempts to define the field and to propose effective modes of research and teaching. In his 2003 book What Is World Literature? David Damrosch understands world literature to be less of a vast collection of works and more a matter of circulation and reception. He proposed that works that thrive as world literature are ones that work well and even gain meaning through translation. Whereas Damrosch's approach remains tied to the close reading of individual works, a different view was taken by the Stanford critic Franco Moretti in a pair of articles offering "Conjectures on World Literature". Moretti believes that the scale of world literature exceeds what can be grasped by traditional methods of close reading, and advocates instead a mode of "distant reading" that would look at large-scale patterns as discerned from publication records and national literary histories. 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. Related to their world-systems approach is the work of French critic Pascale Casanova, La République mondiale des lettres (1999). 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 being world literature. The field of world literature continues to generate debate. Some scholars argue that not all peripheral writers are interested in borrowing from metropolitan centers. Jing Tsu explores the ways in which Macanese poets "like Yiling openly revel in Macau's trivial status of a faded former colony that sits on the periphery of mainland China's periphery". Han Au Chua examines the works of Yu Dafu and argues that: Yu’s works are composed out of transnational engagements, but the cosmopolitan references in his stories do not merely renounce national categories. Rather, these invocations of transnational literature – including nineteenth-century works from Russia, England, and fin-de-siècle European writers – in ‘Sinking’ and ‘Nights of Spring Fever’ complicate the espousal of cosmopolitanism. As a result, Yu’s works prove how foundational dimensions in the world literary space are less inclusive than generally assumed: the first being anachronistic borrowings from transnational loci as the means of competing for temporal consecration and aesthetic modernity, and the second, the supposition that translation helps peripheral writers surmount structural inequalities within the world literary space. Other scholars 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. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak argues 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. 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). ==See also==