World Literature, Transnational Cinema, and Global Media

Towards a Transartistic Commons

Robert Stam

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429767395
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Estudios de medios

With extraordinary transnational and transdisciplinary range, World Literature, Transnational Cinema, and Global Media comprehensively explores the genealogies, vocabularies, and concepts orienting the fields within literature, cinema, and media studies.

Orchestrating a layered conversation between arts, disciplines, and media, Stam argues for their "mutual embeddedness" and their shared "in-between" territories. Rather than merely adding to the existing scholarship, the book builds a relational framework through the connectivities within literature, cinema, music, and media that opens up analysis to new categories and concepts, while crossing spatial, temporal, theoretical, disciplinary, and mediatic borders. The book also questions an array of hierarchies: literature over cinema; source novel over adaptation; feature film over documentary; erudite over vernacular culture; Western modernisms over "peripheral" modernisms; classical over popular music; written poetry over sung poetry, and so forth. The book is structured around the concept of the "commons, " forming a strong thread which links various struggles against "enclosures" of all kinds, with emphasis on natural, indigenous, cultural, creative, digital, and the transdisciplinary commons.

World Literature, Transnational Cinema, and Global Media is ideal to further the theoretical discussion for those undergraduate and graduate departments in cinema studies, media studies, arts and art history, communications, journalism, and new digital media programs at all levels.

1

GOETHE AND WELTLITERATUR

We can begin, then, with the “Worlds.” Alongside the infinity of historically consecrated “Worlds”—”World’s Fairs,” “World Series,” “World Wide Web,” “World Trade Organization,” the “World Social Forum”—we find the artistic Worlds—World Literature, World Cinema, and World Music, all of which I will touch upon in the ensuing pages. The relation between “the World” and the Arts is reciprocal and mutually reinforcing; the “World” adds value to the Arts, while the Arts also add value and prestige to the World.

Unlike World Cinema and World Music, World Literature has a generally acknowledged tutelary figure—Johann Wolfgang Goethe. Thus the concept of World Literature is usually traced back to Goethe’s neologism Weltliteratur, most notably in a diary entry in January 31, 1827, as well as in scattered references elsewhere. The theorists of World Literature almost invariably pay homage to Goethe as totem and patron saint. The initial essays in The Routledge Companion to World Literature, for example, spend considerable energy spelling out what Goethe might have meant by Weltliteratur. Much as all of philosophy has been seen as “footnotes to Plato,” World Lit can be seen as a series of “footnotes to Goethe.” For Goethe, the notion of a purely national literature had become obsolete; “the epoch of world literature,” he famously wrote, “is at hand, and everyone must strive to hasten its approach.”¹ A basic ambiguity, however, as Theo D’haen, David Damrosch and Djelal Kadir point out, has haunted World Literature since Goethe, an oscillation or hesitation between on the one hand a restrictively elitist and ethnocentric definition of World Literature, consisting of on the one hand of European canonical masterpieces cherished by an enlightened coterie, and on the other a more open and democratic World Literature as potentially embracing all literary works by writers everywhere and of every origin.²

World Literature inevitably inherits some of the occidento-centrism of its founding figure. The Euro-diffusionist Goethean model envisioned Western literature as expanding from Europe into the larger world and providing the model for literary study elsewhere. Traditionally, World Literature, and the Comparative Literature for which Goethe was a midwife, emplotted literary history, à la Auerbach, as emerging out of biblical Hebraism and classical Hellenism, all retroactively projected as “Western.” A provincial narrative saw the novel as beginning in Europe—with Don Quixote and Robinson Crusoe often posited as texts of origin, respectively for Southern and Northern Europe. Yet one could just as easily see the novel, defined as fiction in prose, as emerging from outside of Europe and then spreading to Europe. What Arjun Appadurai called the “Eurochronology” problem embeds the axiomatic categories, typologies, and periodizations drawn largely from Western literary history.³ Canonical literary criticism, in this sense, tends to plot artistic history, like history in general, “North by Northwest”—or as some would have it “Plato to Nato”—in a trajectory that leads inexorably from foundational texts such as the Greek epics and the Jewish Bible to literary realism and artistic modernism. But given that the Bible was rooted in Mesopotamia, Canaan, and Africa, given that classical Greek culture, as Martin Bernal has demonstrated, was deeply impacted by Semitic, Phoenician, Egyptian and Ethiopian cultures, one wonders why the Jewish Bible and The Odyssey should be seen as univocally “Western?”⁴

If one defines the novel, à la Margaret Anne Doody, simply as “prose fiction of a certain length,” then the genre can be traced much farther back to the great prose narratives of antiquity such as the Egyptian, the Arab, the Persian, the Indian, and the Syrian.⁵ The novel was the product of combinatory contact between Southern Europe, Western Asia, and Northern Africa. Discovered papyrus fragments of novels have even suggested that novel reading was popular among 2nd-century Egyptians. Nor is it an accident that the title of Heliodorus’ Aithiopika, the longest of the surviving Greek novels, means “Ethiopian Story.” A Renaissance Italian writer like Boccaccio found it normal to draw on the Eastern repertoire of the Fables of Bidpai and Sindbad the Philosopher. Writers like Cervantes and Fielding were quite aware of and influenced by this heritage. “Whoever has read Pamela or Tom Jones,” as Doody puts it, “is in contact with Heliodorus, Longus, Amadis, Petronius” and we too are in contact with them when we “read authors of the nineteenth or twentieth century [such as Salman Rushdie] who have read other authors who read those works.”⁶ In his essay “World Literature and Philology,” Michael Holquist makes similarly broad claims for one of the source disciplines for World Literature—philology—which he traces back not to modern Germany, the site of its latter-day flourishing, but rather to the Fertile Crescent thousands of years ago: “The priests and scholars who kept the wisdom of the Sumerian past alive in the second millennium BCE, through annotations, bilingual texts, and translations,” he writes, were “the first philologists.”⁷

Goethe’s approach to literature was in some ways not so much Eurocentric as Greco-centric, in that he insisted that the literati trace World Literature not to any contemporaneous literature such as the Chinese, the Serbian, or the German, but rather “to the ancient Greeks, in whose works the beauty of mankind is constantly represented.”⁸ In this sense, Goethe’s thought is aligned with a discourse that sees Greece as the “place where it all began,” that traces political democracy to Athens and philosophical thinking to the “Greek miracle,” a working out of the problematics formulated from the pre-Socratics up to the present. World History has no single point of origin—World History is polycentric—yet the Greco-centric vision posits history, including literary history, as “beginning” in Greece.⁹ Yet even during the so-called classical period, literary history was played out around the globe, in China, in the Indus Valley, in Mesopotamia, in Egypt and Ethiopia, and in Meso-America and Turtle Island in indigenous North America. When Greece was falling under Roman hegemony, the Adena culture of what came to be called the Americas had been flourishing for over a millennium.

Unlike the language-haunted 20th-century theory, Goethe’s 19th century was dominated by historical/diachronic modes of thinking which emphasized temporal evolutionary processes ordered around progressive change, a pattern common to Hegelian idealism, Marxist dialectical materialism, the Grimm Brothers Comparative Linguistics, and Darwin’s evolution of the species. As Foucault put it in “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias”:

The great obsession of the 19th century was, as we know, history: with its themes of development and of suspension, of crisis and cycle, themes of the ever-accumulating past, with its great preponderance of dead men and the menacing glacialization of the world.¹⁰

Historicism was also at the basis of the Comparative Linguistics which traced contemporary European and extra-European languages (Sanskrit, Farsi) to a common trunk of an Indo-European Ur-sprache. In this sense, the “World” in “World Literature” has a distinctly Germanic ring, one indissociable from Marx and Hegel and the 19th-century German historical imaginary. As Emily Apter points out, Weltliteratur rhymes with all those other German Welt words—Weltgeist (world spirit), Weltanschauung (world view), Weltkenntnis (world knowledge), and Weltshmerz (world-pain).¹¹ The term carries the distant memory, I would further argue, of the stagist elitism of Hegel’s concept of “world-historical peoples,” a hierarchal concept that ranked privileged peoples and literatures as “world-historical” and relegated those who lacked nation states (for Hegel, Africans and Jews) to a bare existence “outside of history.”

World Literature in Goethe’s sense also has a touch of the Faustian overreacher (although to identify it with a Nietzschean Will to Power would be too much). Who apart from God, or Hercules, after all, could grasp something as all-encompassing as the “World?” Both the advocates and the critics of World Literature note the field’s outlandish ambition. In the 1970s, even formalist literary scholar Rene Wellek complained that the “World Literature” category was simultaneously too indiscriminately inclusive in embracing all of literature and too narrowly exclusive in emphasizing canonical masterpieces.¹² David Damrosch, although from a different school of thought, similarly, has recognized the chimerical, Sisyphean nature of the task of dealing with such an impossibly broad topic, given that it requires many years to develop a deep familiarity even with a single culture. Another World Literature advocate, Franco Moretti, registers the melancholy truth that even the most voracious and polyglot scholar can realistically survey only a few national literatures.¹³

The more skeptical Emily Apter, meanwhile, speaks of the “gargantuan scale of world-literary endeavors.”¹⁴ To truly master the literary world would require not only knowing all of the worlds’ literatures and the languages in which they were spoken and written but also knowing all the cultures that generated those literatures. Even multi-lingual philologists such as Ernst Curtius and Erich Auerbach, well-schooled in ancient and contemporary languages, restricted their ambitions to mastering only the “important” European classical and modern languages and literatures. Even granted total access to all of the world’s literature, Moretti suggests, the most polyglot scholar would still miss the “other 99.5 percent.”¹⁵ Like Woody Allen’s Zelig, ashamed of never having finished Moby Dick, literary intellectuals are always en manque, haunted by the White Whale of what Margaret Cohen, in a different context, calls “the great Unread.”

2

THE THEORY OF WORLD LITERATURE

In a key text for our discussion, David Damrosch has defined “World Literature” as encompassing “all literary works that circulate beyond their culture of origin, either in translation or in their original language.” Damrosch distinguishes between World Literature as 1) an established body of classics, and 2) an evolving canon of masterpieces. To avoid an overly capacious definition, Damrosch stipulates a series of requirements for World Literature status. Apart from simply circulating beyond national borders, World Literature must have 1) the quality of “gaining” in translation, and 2) the capacity to “estrange” us from the axiomatic norms of our home culture. Damrosch has also pointed to the reflexive “meta” dimension of World Literature, seeing it less as a fixed canon of works than “a mode of circulation and of reading”¹ and as “multiple windows on the world.”²

Alongside “Third World Literature” and “Postcolonial Studies,” “World Literature” continues the project of deprovincializing literary studies as it had conventionally been taught in the West. Damrosch begins his book How to Read World Literature by defining the temporal stretch of a World Literature which reaches back in time over nearly five millennia, and extends in space to almost every inhabited region of the globe. Damrosch avoids Goethe’s Greco-centrism by opening up a space for Sumerian poetry, Indian rasa aesthetics, the Pyramid texts of ancient Egypt, and what he calls the “exquisite” body of poetry issuing from the pre-Columbian Aztec empire.³ Significantly, Damrosch’s choice for “the first true work of world literature”—the Gilgamesh Epic—is not Greek but Mesopotamian.⁴ Damrosch also takes swipes at the Eurocentric assumptions orienting literary anthologies, criticizing the Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces for mapping a literary “World” (at least up to the 1985 edition) basically comprised West Europe and the United States, and where even the 1992 edition included only a “handful of non-western authors.”⁵ An admirable sense of cultural relativism, moreover, animates Damrosch’s call for us to understand “the different literary assumptions made in different cultures, including assumptions to what is literature itself …”⁶

Damrosch moves easily from Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex to Kalidasa’s Shakuntala as two masterpieces of world drama, “products of ancient, polytheistic societies, in which numbers of gods were believed to act in all areas of earthly life.”⁷ Practicing a kind of comparative cross-cultural criticism, Damrosch dances gracefully from epic to epic across the globe, leaping with great stylistic and analytical agility from literary vine to literary vine, from the Iliad to the Ramayana, from Homer to Walcott, from Dante to Amiri Baraka, from the Bible to Gilgamesh. The cultural counterpoint is not that of Said’s “contrapuntal reading,” however, since in Damrosch’s case there is no agenda of “haunting” one chronotopic space/time with another space/time as a part of a deconstructive postcolonial project, or for that matter with any political project beyond reforming and pluralizing the literary curiculum.

“World Literature” in some ways occupies the functional slot of Matthew Arnold’s “best that has been thought and written.” In this sense, “World Literature” has a curatorial vocation to gather under its umbrella the most important works. It necessarily invokes, if only tacitly, an idea of aesthetic standards, of works that merit the status of a “world-class” literature. Damrosch is obviously not suggesting that all texts, from those of James Joyce to those of Stephen King, that circulate beyond their linguistic and cultural points of origin qualify for entry into the sphere of World Literature. In this sense, we might spell out a distinction—valid for the other arts as well—between those works that manage to circulate thanks to specific configurations of power, for example from elite patronage or from massive corporate or mediatic promotion, and those that circulate because they deserve to circulate thanks to their indisputable aesthetic and narrative excellence. The passage from local to global is not rigid, however, and some works—Ulysses and Lolita come to mind—first gain a reputation for excellence and only later receive massive institutional support).

At times, World Literature, or at least literature enjoying worldwide marketability, meets the World Wide Web, as when Paulo Coelho, in a literary...