Edited by
Karen-Margrethe Simonsen & Jakob Stougaard-Nielsen
WORLD LITERATURE
WORLD CULTURE
INTRODUCTION: WORLD LITERATURE AND WORLD CULTURE
Karen-Margrethe Simonsen & Jakob Stougaard-Nielsen
The concept of world literature is both old and new. It is old in the sense that it has “always” been used to designate literature from around the world, and that at least since the time of Goethe it has been used not only to specify a literary canon but also to engage in the ethical project of enlarging our literary horizons to include more than just a few national literatures. As Franco Moretti argues, however, the project outlined by Goethe has never been properly implemented. Only now are we beginning to see the contours of a new scholarly field dealing with world literature, and only recently have we begun to develop new methods, a fitting terminology and a new perspective on the world of literature. In that sense, world literature is an entirely new notion, and innovative investigations into its various modes, histories, institutions and aesthetics have increased considerably in number and variety within the last two decades.
If it is true that world literature is now developing into a renewed area of interest, the first question is why. An obvious answer is that the development is due to globalisation. However, this cannot be the whole truth, since globalisation is not an entirely new phenomenon. Over the centuries different waves of globalisation have swept over the globe, from the crusades of the Middle Ages, the conquest of the Americas and the later colonisations of Africa, Asia and Australia, to the exploratory travels and the capitalist, industrial and technological expansions of the Modern age. Globalisation has shaped societies and individual lives around the globe throughout our history, and interactions between different parts of the planet have been a recurring phenomenon: brutal when it takes the form of warfare and colonisation, productive when it involves the trade of goods and the blending of peoples, languages and cultures. However, as one can see from this brief but symptomatic list, globalisation seemed, for many centuries, to proceed in one direction only: from Europe out towards the rest of the world.
Not until about the middle of the twentieth century did this change. Europe is not necessarily at the centre of the global expansions taking place at the moment, and globalisation has itself taken on new forms and dynamics. Metaphorically speaking, one could say that globalisation today looks less like an octopus – a head with many arms – and more like a spider’s web: a dynamic network. The most important characteristic of such networks is that they are, in Carlos Fuentes’ term, “polycentric”, and that each part of the network, as Frank Schulze-Engler has pointed out, has the capacity for self-reflexivity and an ability to influence the entire system. To suggest that today’s globalised cultures form this type of network is not, of course, to deny the existence of significant power structures and hegemonies (the occasional spider pulling the threads), but it allows for a more precise understanding of how people, literatures and cultures in fact interact, and how different cultures and texts translate into one another in complex and often unpredictable ways.
A renewed engagement with the “old” concept of world literature, in a markedly changed, multi-directional and networked global age, is one way in which literary and cultural studies may contribute to a fruitful understanding of how the globalisation of literary expression, production and reception has taken place in the past, how it is shaping our world today and what directions it may possibly take in the future. We need to keep in mind that globalisation is not something that happens to literature. On the contrary, literature itself is one of the driving forces behind globalisation, interacting as it does with other cultural expressions, policies, technologies and communication networks across national borders and oceans. But seeking to understand the dynamics of literature in a globalised age by mapping the ways in which the literatures of the entire world flow across geographic and temporal borders is a daunting task for specialists and generalists alike.
The American Comparative Literature community has attempted to respond to this challenge. Already by 1993 the Bernheimer Report on the state of comparative literature was presenting multiculturalism as the new paradigm for literary studies, a paradigm that saw the need to integrate more non-European and non-Western literatures into the national curriculum. By the time the next such report was published in the new millennium (Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalization, 2006, ed. Haun Saussy), this was seen to be a more challenging task. In Saussy’s volume the concept of world literature is seen as a tool to assist in the otherwise impossible task of navigating the vast libraries of a global literature in all languages, and moreover of charting the more violent, displacing hegemonic realities that have proved to be the darker side to globalisation.
Since the late 1990s, a number of scholars have responded to the challenges of globalisation within literary studies, not so much by widening the canon – which was surely needed, and to some extent accomplished in certain areas – but by looking at the institutionalised national literatures from new, and various, global perspectives. Thus Franco Moretti, in his “Conjectures on World Literature”, offers the apollonian vision of a “global atlas of the novel”, in which waves of genres and literary forms wash back and forth over the history and surface of the earth, forming a complex, centreless map in which difference reins; others – notably David Damrosch in his What is World Literature? (2003) – find literary value in the translated and transformed languages of literature: languages that were formerly held to be corrupted renderings of the original, localised and national versions. The idea of according a central place in world literature precisely to translation is radicalised still further in the work of Emily Apter, who uses the term “translation zone” to designate sites that are profoundly in-translation and universally differential and which have had an enormous impact on contemporary life around the globe: on “diaspora language communities, print and media, public spheres, institutions of governmentality and language policy-making and theatres of war” (Apter 6). Pascale Casanova meanwhile offers a similarly cosmopolitan view of the world of literature, describing a networked system in which diverse languages and cultures are attracted to cultural centres of literary capital such as Paris, and in the process produce a cosmopolitan reformation of the literatures and cultures of both the centre and the periphery. Looking at the national literatures from a global perspective may also, as in Wai Chee Dimock’s work, mean approaching them from a de-nationalised point of view, seeing them within what she calls (in a term borrowed from Spivak) “a planetary literary system” that is a primary agency in undermining nationalism from within. According to Dimock, “planetary” literature has always been transterritorial and as such has operated as a driving force behind globalisation.
These different approaches to globalisation in literary studies today – variously encountered in translation studies, in post-colonialist approaches, in planetary literary studies, or in theses positing a world republic of letters, an atlas of the novel or other cosmopolitan visions of world literature – regard the decentred, networked globe as a new paradigm and a new challenge to the study of comparative and national literature. The present anthology lends its own, primarily European, voices, visions and literary locations to the task of addressing this global challenge.
In this new situation, Europe has to rethink its role and position. Ulrich Beck has argued that the European tradition is cosmopolitan in its very essence, but in his view it was not until after the Second World War that European nations accepted the consequences of this, primarily by giving up some of their national sovereignty. In Beck’s view, therefore, there is not necessarily an opposition between the national and the global. Still, cosmopolitanism must be the adversary of traditional nationalism. As Franco Moretti writes: “there is no other justification for the study of world literature (and for the existence of departments of comparative literature) but this: to be a thorn in the side, a permanent intellectual challenge to national literatures – especially the local literature” (68). The study of world literature is, first and foremost, an invitation to rethink the relationship between, on the one hand, the local, national and international anchoring of