One of the most fascinating institutions of world literature is the annual “canonisation” of an internationally recognized, but not always nationally recognized, Nobel laureate. The permanent secretary of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Horace Engdahl, discusses in his article the motivations behind the awards made since the prize was instituted over a hundred years ago, and the ways in which these choices have been received. The awards, he argues, can be seen as firmly grounded in a Goethean conception of world literature, while at the same time incorporating the aesthetic values of a changing literary landscape throughout the twentieth century. For Casanova, the Prize represents, for good or ill, the highest honour the world republic of letters has to give; it is a standard for literary value in a universal literary space. Though such universality may be due to the importance accorded to the Prize worldwide, and to the fact that it inevitably stirs up discussions about the national importance and international relevance of the prize-winning authors, the list of laureates reveals that, for many, exile and migration were a condition of their work. In this sense, the institution of the Nobel Prize in the world republic of letters has upheld a non-nation-based conception of literature, and offers an always disputed, yet valued place of refuge for authors and literary works that have succeeded in crossing national borders. At the same time, Engdahl writes, the experience of working within an institution of world literature has shown that every nation has its own idea of what world literature is and what works belong to the international canon, while larger nations tend to assume that their version of the international canon of world literature must be the canon.
The challenge of the perspectives gathered in this anthology is to maintain a stereoscopic view on the national/transnational, provincial/cosmopolitan condition of literature and cultures that are constantly on the move, belonging simultaneously nowhere and everywhere.
WORKS CITED
Apter, Emily. The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2006.
Beck, Ulrich. The Cosmopolitan Vision. Trans. by Ciaran Cronin. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006.
Bernheimer, Charles. ed. Comparative Literature in the Age of Multiculturalism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1995.
Casanova, Pascale. The World Republic of Letters. Trans. by M. B. DeBevoise. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2004.
Damrosch, David. What is World Literature? Princeton: Princeton UP, 2003.
Dimock, Wai Chee. Through Other Continents: American Literature Across Deep Time. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2006.
Fuentes, Carlos. Geografía de la novela. Mexico City: Fondo de cultura econnómica, 1993.
Larsen, Svend Erik. Tekster Uden Grænser: Litteratur og Globalisering. Aarhus: Aarhus Universitetsforlag, 2007.
Moretti, Franco. Atlas of the European Novel, 1800-1900. London: Verso, 1998.
_____. “Conjectures on World literature.” New Left Review 1 (2000): 54-68.
Saussy, Haun. ed. Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalization. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2006.
Schulze-Engler, Frank. “From Postcolonial to Preglobal: Transnational Culture.” Geoffrey V. Davis, et al (eds.). Cross/Cultures 77. ASNEL Papers 9.1. Towards a Transcultural Future. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004. 49-64.
WORLD LITERATURE OR LITERATURE AROUND THE WORLD?
Svend Erik Larsen, University of Aarhus
SMALL TOWN, GLOBAL IMPACT
Without Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Weimar would have been an unknown place, even a non-place, somewhere on the Eastern outskirts of Central Europe. With Goethe Weimar became, for more than a generation, a cultural center for both the German-speaking part of Europe and for Europe as a whole. The city maintained this central cultural status after Goethe passed away in 1832. Weimar was the capital, Hauptstadt, of one the many small German principalities, Sachsen-Weimar. Actually, it was more Haupt than Stadt. The head was Goethe’s, which reflected within it most of the rest of the world, while the city in Goethe’s lifetime harbored a mere 8,000 inhabitants.
In face-to-face encounters and in his correspondence, Goethe gathered important thinkers, artists and diplomats from all over Europe, crossing the national boundaries of his day. You did not wash your hands for a couple of days, it was said, after having shaken hands with the famous Goethe. He was a diplomat, a civil servant and a polyhistor in the cosmopolitan spirit of the eighteenth century, and he was engaged in modern sciences such as geology and biology as well as in philosophy, arts and letters. But, first and foremost, he was instrumental in forming a conception of human life. Under the name Bildung, it came to constitute a cornerstone of general education and formation that still dominates today, particularly in Central and Northern Europe.
After Goethe’s death, Weimar continued to be a symbol of German and European culture that for better or worse had a global impact. The city seemed to need a break after Goethe’s lifelong activities, and its cultural profile narrowed down to the arts. European composers such as Franz Liszt and Richard Wagner walked the streets and visited the salons and concert halls. Then, shortly after 1900, Weimar became the home of an arts and crafts school that would exert as great an influence on art, science and politics as Goethe’s work. Known as the Bauhaus school, it became a driving force in twentieth-century architecture, urban planning, design and visual culture across the globe. This was mainly due to Bauhaus’s combination of innovative creativity, traditional craftsmanship and modern industrial production. Its designs, materials and forms of production also opened up new vistas in the social and political sphere. The activities of Bauhaus had global consequences in forging a modern conception of the urban environment of streets, workplaces and homes. Modern design, in all its different forms, would not have existed without Weimar and Bauhaus.
But post-Goethean Weimar gave birth to other striking phenomena as well. One of the first constitutions on the European continent was born there in 1816, offering a tentative first step towards the democratic constitutions that took shape later in the century. In 1919, in the aftermath of the First World War, Germany made the attempt to become properly democratic with the Weimar Republic. The republic came to a bitter end when Hitler and the Nazis rose to power in 1933 and shortly thereafter initiated another World War. Of course, the Nazi regime was well aware that Weimar conjured up both old Germanic greatness and the political breakdown after the First World War, and they cultivated the positive symbolism of greatness with a perverted zeal that led to terrible effects. Already by 1937, the concentration camp Buchenwald had been built almost in Goethe’s back yard. The Spanish prisoner and member of the French resistance, Jorge Semprún, describes in L’écriture ou la vie (1994) how he walked around the site, wondering how, precisely in this place, world culture could have been transformed into world torture.
The former East-German communist regime also tried, in 1968, to launch a new constitution in Weimar with more allusions to the myth of Goethe than real contributions from his work. Finally, in 1998 the Goethe archives, the old part of Weimar and the Bauhaus site were declared a part of the world’s cultural heritage by UNESCO, and Weimar and its now 65,000 inhabitants became the European cultural capital of 1999.
If a small city such as Weimar can repeatedly constitute a veritable global center, under changing historical conditions, then this role is open to any other place on earth. It is not the place as such, but the quality of its visions that determines its cultural importance.
WORLD LITERATURE IN A PROVINCIAL TOWN
Goethe developed such visions through his primary activity, literature. This was the source of all his other activities. Toward the end of his life he had a series of conversations with Johann Peter Eckermann who