In offering further reflections on world literature, therefore, we need to rethink our methods and the scope of our investigation. By merely expanding our literary canon we may not necessarily achieve the humanistic goal of greater knowledge and tolerance that Goethe envisaged when he urged upon us the study of world literature. Damrosch, responding to Friedrich Schleiermacher’s hermeneutic version of tolerance, argues on the contrary that: “The result [of reading world literature] may be almost the opposite of the ‘fusion of horizons’ that Friedrich Schleiermacher envisioned when we encounter a distant text; we may actually experience our customary horizon being set askew, under the influence of works whose foreignness remains fully in view” (300).
It is a risky business to read world literature, and even more so to study it, and it immediately raises a whole set of questions: what is world literature, what texts/literatures should be studied, what kind of world are we talking about, how does literature circulate and what is the purpose of studying it? Answering these questions means making some very serious choices. As Damrosch emphasises, it is not possible to know everything that one ought to know if one were to claim a comprehensive knowledge of world literature, and that is true almost irrespective of how one defines that field. One is therefore forced to balance the value of close reading against that of contextual knowledge, comparative range, historical framing, linguistic understanding and institutional considerations. Not everything can be studied in depth, and some books will have to be read in translation. While Moretti recommends a method he has termed “distant reading”, Damrosch will not give up on close reading, and opts instead for a reading of world literature through the study of heterogeneously combined microcanons. Whatever your choice, you have to define the field of research. The natural frame of the world will not delimit the object quite as neatly as the old national frames once did.
In this anthology, we investigate the possible meanings of the concept of world literature in a new era of globalisation, looking at the range of the concept, the degree to which it will reorient our approaches to new literature and the ways in which it may lead us to reconceptualise and reorient our approach to older literary periods. We have chosen to divide the anthology into four inter-dependent sections, each focussing on, though not limited by, one of the four themes that we regard as common and central to a reconfiguration of the study of world literature in a globalised age: Histories, Translation, Migration and Institutions.
HISTORIES
The recent interest in world literature must be seen in relation to an historical development that gained momentum in the late eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, that is, with the outset of modernity. This development has redefined the relationship between individual Bildung and national history, between local history and global interactions. Modernity, even in its most local forms, is closely linked to a global mental space (see Svend Erik Larsen). Thus our modern mode of historical reflection, based on a certain philosophically defined humanism, the notion of national identity and the positivist method, harks back to eighteenth and nineteenth century thinking, and so does our concept of literary history, which reflects a given period’s view of the geographical and cultural context of literature. Literary histories with an international scope can be found as early as the late eighteenth century, when Juan Andrés Morell wrote his Origen, progresos y estado actual de toda la literatura (“Origin, progress and the contemporary status of all literature”, 1782-1799). For Andrés, the aim of literary history was both to restore the reputation of Spanish literature outside Spain and to reinscribe the influence of Arabic culture on European culture, thus diminishing the importance of Greek and, especially, Latin cultures (see Tomás González Ahola). Histories of world literature will inevitably favour some national literatures over others, but they are also bound to frame the understanding of national literatures within a particular worldview. The particular texts, historical lines and influences that a literary historian chooses to highlight in describing the development of a given national literature will reveal his or her implicit view of world literature.
The aim of the section entitled “Histories” is thus not only to offer pertinent perspectives on the chronological development of world literature, but also to show that the concept of world literature demands a new perspective on historical developments and on historicity as such. Historical perspectives hardly ever serve as mere background material; they are guided by the implicit aim of any given study and should themselves be seen, therefore, as the object of methodological reflection, just as any given method needs historical contextualisation. The question is how to maintain a balance.
In the mid- and late twentieth century there was a tendency within the discipline of Comparative Literature to replace historical studies of literature with philosophical reflections. French post-histoire cultural analysis and the dominant trends within postcolonial studies were highly theoretical and sceptical in their attitude towards historical narrations. Such narrations were thought to be altmodisch and for the most part too narrowly European. However, history does not simply come to a halt, and scholars of world literature need to reopen the discussion of how we can “historise” in new ways today (see David Marno). In re-evaluating our approach to history we also need to question the kinds of access the individual has to history and how such access is mediated. It is no accident that memory studies in recent years have attracted so much attention, both at the popular and the academic level, and there is a growing interest today in the related study of witness literature. The fascination of such literature lies to a large extent in the fact that the individual, particular story may mean something to a wider public and, simultaneously, offer a more general understanding of history (see Michel de Dobbeleer’s article in the “Translation” section). A parallel development in literary studies is the growing interest in the ways in which we actually experience literature. The increasing scholarly interest in the meaning of nostalgia, and especially nostalgia as presented in literature, seems to elevate personal, idiosyncratic and emotional involvement in history to a productive strategy for coming to terms with the traumatic and incomprehensible elements of our past (see Fiona Schouten).
TRANSLATIONS
According to Damrosch, world literature is writing that gains in translation (281). From a traditional national perspective, this observation seems counter-intuitive. Any literary work, one would think, must surely lose some of its linguistic expressiveness and meaningful cultural references when it is translated and circulated in a different culture; translation can offer at best an inferior, at worst a distorted copy of the original. From a national perspective, indeed, a translator is seen as a traitor (Larsen 245). But from the perspective of world literature, the opposite is true: here, the translator is the hero, a central actor in the world of letters. She acts not only as a “cosmopolitan intermediary”, in Casanova’s terms, but also, as Goethe recognized, creates literary value by her work (Casanova 21, 14). Literature not only survives in translation but gains new meanings and relevance every time it crosses geographical, cultural and linguistic borders. Goethe held the work of translation in high esteem, regarding it as one of the most essential aspects of international trade. Without translation the global economy would be brought to a standstill, there would be no such thing as globalisation to talk and write about; nor, by the same token, would there be any world or even national literatures. Given the centrality of the international market to the dynamics of globalisation it is not surprising that translation studies have come to occupy a central role in studies of world literature.
Translation, both in the limited sense referring to the transfer of material from one language to another, and in the more general sense denoting the dynamic of any intercultural exchange, is perhaps more important today than ever before. A great many professional translators nowadays risk their lives in theatres of war amidst ethnic unrest, and the massive movement of peoples around the globe has perforce made translators out of numerous ordinary people displaced by war, repressive governments, economic and environmental catastrophes, or just seeking a better, more adventurous life. Both the professional translator and the multilingual