World literature consists not in a specific group of texts, but rather in certain effects that literature produces when we read it in different, concrete contexts and in conjunction with other texts and cultural phenomena. It creates a unified perspective through different texts – as happens, for example, when literature becomes a cognitive model for global thinking and opens windows, doors and barriers, allowing the wind from the great world to blow into the specific locality where each of us lives.
This view of world literature is shared by more recent researchers such as David Damrosch in What is World Literature? (2003):
World literature is an elliptical refraction of national literatures. World literature is writing that gains in translation. World literature is not a set canon of texts but a mode of reading: a form of detached engagement with worlds beyond our own place and time … This refraction is double in nature: works become world literature by being received into the space of a foreign culture … Even a single work of world literature is the locus of a negotiation between two different cultures … World literature is thus always as much about the host culture’s values and needs as it is about a work’s source culture; hence it is a double refraction. (280, 283)
Although Damrosch was not familiar with Brandes’ essay when he wrote his book, he exemplifies Brandes’ viewpoint: thus Brandes’ and Damrosch’s texts are themselves examples of different texts that offer a unified perspective.
Damrosch furthers Brandes’ point by emphasizing that the label ‘world literature’ depends on more than the text itself. It is a qualification that follows from the way we read and use literature, based on the concrete possibilities offered by textual structures. Literature consists of texts without borders only in so far as our reading actually opens the borders. However, to read all texts from that perspective does not entail that all texts are equally relevant or valuable – that they all have sufficient “vitality and power” to be outstanding world literature. Literature becomes world literature with a cultural impact only when it enables us to open the gates to the world around us, irrespective of the language and place in which it was written.
LITERATURE AROUND THE WORLD
Brandes also touches on another important point: the worldwide dissemination of literature and knowledge. He mentions the importance of transport, communication and the modern press. Today we could expand his list to include the import and export of educational systems, the use of electronic media, the flow of exchange students and back packers, the various media conglomerates and other elements of modern globalization. In emphasizing nevertheless the primary importance of local anchoring, Brandes indirectly makes both a general and a double claim about world literature: first, local anchoring is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for literature to be world literature, and, second, its widespread circulation through the channels available in any given age is a sufficient but not a necessary condition for a given text to acquire the status of world literature.
The tension between the local and the global aspects of literature is therefore articulated by the textual structure itself and thus becomes a topic for various interpretive theories and methodologies centered on texts. Furthermore, changing conditions of circulation and the problems they entail inevitably force us to address theoretical and methodological problems, but do not offer the means to solve them. Finally, there are texts out there with a limited circulation that have the potential to become world literature. They are only waiting to be known outside the confines of the local language, culture and media.
Some texts will make it outside the enclosure, others not. Some will make it with a considerable delay, as happened, for instance, with the aboriginal dream-time narratives that became known through the global success of aboriginal painting and Bruce Chatwin’s The Songlines (1987); others with less delay, as in the case of Imre Kertész’s Fateless (1976), which jumped from obscurity to world fame via the Nobel Prize in 2003. In such cases the tension between local conditions and the global perspective is an integral part of the texts, although the route to their worldwide dissemination may often seem accidental. Such texts require new reading strategies and theoretical approaches that may have implications for a general reorientation of existing literary traditions. This happens when new genres arise, as in the case of witness literature, migrant literatures or hyper fiction, or when new focus points such as place, translation or performativity attract scholarly attention.
Global dissemination follows at least three itineraries, each of which is manifested in various ways in the texts themselves and prompts new reading strategies:
Translation: In most cases translation is seen as a technical procedure that transfers a text from one language to another, but in doing so often diminishes its potential or even distorts it. In view of the fact that most languages and cultures are deeply dependent on and shaped by translation processes in various media, this is a reductive view. Translation is a productive cultural invention propelled by the mutual challenge of two or more languages and media, an intervention that changes both languages and is thereby a powerful factor in cultural development. In the texts themselves translation is traced as the meeting of two or more cultures, and hybrid or broken languages are have increasingly become an important feature of modern texts, which thereby aesthetically reflect the globalized dimension of local cultures.
This feature is of course known from earlier texts, particularly works of prose and comedy. Sociolects and dialects are used to pinpoint characters as foreign and often as ridiculous. The interpretive framework behind this use of linguistic contrasts is the classical tripartion of styles into high, low and medium, each of which corresponds to a cultural value system. A late example can be seen in Honoré de Balzac’s recurring character Baron de Nucingen, who speaks a hybrid Franco-German lingo invented by Balzac. In more recent texts the point is different. Here the broken language is a sign of an individual or local refraction of global migrant reality; take, for example Derek Wallcots’ Omeros (1990), Aleksandar Hemon’s Nowhere Man (2002), Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredible Close (2005), Jonas Hassen Khemiri’s Montecore (2006) and Xiaolu Guo’s Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers (2007).
Anonymous use: In considering how literature is used, we usually focus on the actual reading experience and on the concrete circulation of books through specific channels or media. But the effect of literature can also be discerned in the everyday language and images used and understood by people who may never actually have read, borrowed or bought the literature in question. This phenomenon is due to the fact that meanings proliferate in complex and random ways that cannot be explained purely by reference to the reading of specific texts and the use of specific channels of communication. Quotations from Homer or the Bible, images of national landscapes, fictional characters such as Gulliver or stereotypical actions such as fighting windmills are used and understood by people who may have no idea where the phrases, images and characters originate. Hence, tracing such references back to their origin will not provide much of a clue to understanding the process by which they are assimilated into general use.
Such more or less random cultural traces may originate in the school curriculum, in popular songs or in the writings and speeches of journalists or politicians who may likewise be unaware of their sources. Once it is written, literature belongs to its language, and some of its phrases continue to work within that language far beyond the intentions or knowledge of the author, publisher or critic. Through translation or intercultural communication such linguistic effects may be transported to other cultures in unpredictable ways. The same goes for film: the visual languages of film and other media inspire those who shape our visual surroundings in urban design, posters and fashion, and thus a visual dimension enters the lives of people who have never even set foot in a cinema.
Though it is a fundamental factor in the global dissemination of literature, this anonymous process is difficult to study and explain in detail. Nevertheless, the process may give rise to various kinds of canons. The classical canon, authorized by a central institution, is only a minor factor compared to the amalgamation of canons produced