Comparative Cultural Studies and the New Weltliteratur

Elke Sturm-Trigonakis

• Publisher: Purdue University Press
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781612492865
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: German Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In this English translation and revision of her acclaimed German-language book, Elke Sturm-Trigonakis expands on Goethe's notion of Weltliteratur (1827) to propose that, owing to globalization, literature is undergoing a profound change in process, content, and linguistic practice. Rather than producing texts for a primarily national readership, modern writers can collate diverse cultural, literary, and linguistic traditions to create new modes of expression that she designates as "hybrid texts." The author introduces an innovative framework to analyse these new forms of expression that is based on comparative cultural studies and its methodology of contextual (systemic and empirical) approaches to the study of literature and culture, including the concepts of the macro-and micro-systems of culture and literature. To illustrate her proposition, Sturm-Trigonakis discusses selected literary texts that exhibit characteristics of linguistic and cultural hybridity, the concept of "in-between," and transculturality and thus are located in a space of a "new world literature." Examples include Gastarbeiterliteratur ("migrant literature") by authors such as Chiellino, Shami, and Atabay. The book is important reading for philologists, linguists, sociologists, and other scholars interested in the cultural and linguistic impact of globalization on literature and culture. The German edition of this volume was originally published as Global playing in der Literatur. Ein Versuch über die Neue Weltliteratur (2007) and it has been translated in collaboration with the author by Athanasia Margoni and Maria Kaisar.

Chapter One

Goethe’s Weltliteratur and the Career of an Idea

Dieter Lamping states that “Weltliteratur is one of the great ideas of the nineteenth century and one of the few which have survived the epoch of its genesis … Owing to this idea we do not perceive literature as something exclusively national, as a mere sum of single literatures, which evolve according to laws of their own, completely independent from each other, even in confrontation to each other” (9). Lamping argues that the idea of Weltliteratur is long lived and still sells on the cultural market, on the one hand, but now needs an actualization and a more precise definition under globalized conditions on the other hand, as it is experiencing controversial interpretations. Although the term itself was circulating before Goethe (see Lange 25–26 on its use by August Wilhelm Schlegel; see also Schmitt), it became popular through Goethe’s period of cosmopolitanism. Since then, world literature as a theme has been a literary evergreen and perhaps because of this it produces a certain weariness. It has, however, been experiencing a new boom in recent years as its applicability proves opportune because of the impact of globalization (for a list of single-authored books and edited volumes on world literature including Goethe, see Tötösy de Zepetnek, “Multingual”). Since Goethe’s idea has already received much attention, in the following I refer to the extensive literature on this subject only to the extent that it contributes to clarify the performance of “world literature” with regard to the discourse of globalization. Consequently, the focus of my remarks is on the question of the direction in which this idea can be thought of today in the course of global differentiation and homogenization and the new contents with which it should be updated.

In order to describe the objective of Goethe’s idea of Weltliteratur appropriately, we must first give a classification of the term in the context of its creation and release. It turns out that Goethe himself used this designation only in five passages, three of which appear in the journal edited by him, Über Kunst und Alterthum in den Rhein- und Maingegenden (1816–1832), in the issues covering the years 1827 and 1828. The other two are found in an essay planned for an issue in 1830, the ideas of which have been mentioned in Goethe’s introduction to Carlyle’s biography by Schiller, as well as in an edition of the Wanderjahre dated 1829 (see Bohnenkamp 189). The other entries, unpublished during Goethe’s lifetime—thirteen in his work and two in Johann Peter Eckermann’s conversations—are directly or indirectly connected with articles in the journal Über Kunst und Alterthum. The importance is that Über Kunst und Alterthum was the platform for an international—for that time—exchange about literature. Despite the limited number of 750 copies printed, Über Kunst und Alterthum met with a positive response in Britain, France, and Italy (see Bohnenkamp) and it provided Goethe with the opportunity to acquaint the German public with works in foreign languages and at the same moment to point out that German literature enjoyed a lively reception in other European countries. Über Kunst und Alterthum was for Goethe the means to propagate the thoughts of a mature writer and scholar and to pass on the cosmopolitanism of the eighteenth century to the nineteenth, despite the growing nationally conscious attitude of European nations: his idea of Weltliteratur constituted work in progress. A definition with quantitative or qualitative characteristics, as in the majority of the relevant literature lexica, was not Goethe’s task; his notion was a process of “international communication and reciprocal reception” because “every literature, if not refreshed by foreign participation, is in the end bored in its own self” (Bohnenkamp 203). In Goethe’s sense this occurs particularly via translations, consequently, Über Kunst und Altertum dedicated considerable space to the topic of translation and translation criticism, for only through knowledge of other cultural conditions would the ennui in domestic literature be combated effectively. Thus, Goethe never tired of thanking the translators.

In Goethe’s view, the merit of the translator is not just that he or she is interpolated into a hitherto inaccessible, alien culture, but rather that this transfer also creates a counter movement of approach to the other culture by exciting “an irresistible attraction for the original” that the translation creates (Werke 12: 499). In today’s terminology, the translator performs a significant cultural practice, as Goethe conceived the concept of translating as extremely wide, by equating the translator, with reference to the Bible and the Qur’an, with a “prophet of his people … who practices one of the most important and honorable actions in world communication” (12: 353). While translation was only a second choice for Goethe compared to the original, still, in his pragmatic way he seemed to give unconditional preference to a “veiled beauty” in comparison to a nonbeauty. However, Goethe’s didactic concern did not exhaust itself in the perception of the foreign. On the contrary, as a result of it the one is appreciated by means of taking the detour to the other (12: 503). Therefore, in Goethe’s view, the mastery of the German native tongue suffices for the majority of the population. In a large part this expresses Goethe’s aristocratic attitude, but for him this attitude is less associated with privileges than with duties and first and foremost with the obligation to have the power of judgment regarding the proper environment in accordance with the motto that one “who does not know foreign languages, does not know anything of his or her own” (Werke 12: 508). Goethe certainly would have read with pleasure the German poetry of José F. A. Oliver with its bold neologisms and interference from the Spanish and other languages. However, while these views were eccentric for the Romantics, they influenced the German cultural environment of his time. Thus he planned for a school book of poetry from the whole world, the Plan eines lyrischen Volksbuches, which he presented upon request by the Bavarian government in 1808, but which the government did not find suitable.

With his positive evaluation of cultural exchange, Goethe set a counterpoint to national literature, primarily through his frequently cited statement of 31 January 1827, which gave distinct utterance to his cultural relativism with the primacy of ancient Greek (qtd. in Eckermann 174). Still, it would be too simplistic to set the cosmopolitanism of Goethe against the unity of national literature and national policy, the way this was established between 1808 and 1815. Although Goethe had campaigned already in 1816 against the language purists, “in the relation of German national literature to world literature he was not interested in German and non-German” (Mayer 15). For example, if we compare his numerous comments on the English and the French, their countries, their cultural characteristics, and literatures with those on the Germans, it is quickly verified, first, that he frequently presented these two nations—with a didactic intention—as superior to the Germans (see Boerner 186), and second, that the majority of these observations refer to the national literatures of the named people and less so to the nations in their totality or their economic or political conditions. In the background of Goethe’s interest in “national particularities” lay his effort for exchange and communication between respective national literatures, whereas the universal element in every literature, the “universally human,” was important to him because this is exactly where he saw the idea of Weltliteratur manifested (see Boerner 186–87). Undoubtedly, there is something old-fashioned in his approach in his era of growing nationalism, and it seems to anchor the old Goethe—backward-looking—in the cosmopolitanism of the Enlightenment (see Seeba 203). It is well known that he was no supporter of the Romantic elevation of the national element and that he rejected the exclusive search for identity in all things German. The question, however, is whether we should shelve his concept of Weltliteratur as an exclusive product of the Enlightenment or whether its incompleteness and indefiniteness can inspire us to think further.

In his Goethes Begriff der Weltliteratur, Hans Joachim Schrimpf seems to vote in favor of the first option, as he thinks that Goethe’s “understanding of world literature, which [was] formulated in old age, cannot be considered only as the result of a long life experience, but [ ] should also be interpreted historically as an expression and awareness of a late period” (50). Goethe wrote in 1831 a short essay, entitled “Epochen geselliger Bildung,” in which he designed a four-stage model of the development of social and literary periods (Goethes Werke 1: 361–62). The fourth level, the highest, the “expression of every advanced civilization in the stage of a late period,” represented for him the “universal epoch” (Schrimpf 50). While the first “idyllic” stage he attributed to narrowly limited popular culture dominated by terms such as “home piety, patriotism, home industry, and national literature,” the “universal” stage he defined by characteristics such as “world piety, world politics, [and] world culture,” followed by the last stage, Weltliteratur. How little he thought of all stages that stood below the universal is evident in his repeated attacks against the “pious religiosity, patriotism, spirit worship, constant transcendence, irrationalism, and the inclination towards the chaotic and elemental” (Schrimpf 22), which he regarded as hazardous components of the Romantic movement. In Schrimpf’s opinion, Goethe’s position is an “expression of a historical concern” (27) whose right to exist will be confirmed in a terrible way in the twentieth century by the excesses of totalitarian regimes. Schrimpf’s 1968 study, along with the still indispensable—owing to its richness in material—1946 study by Fritz Strich, Goethe und die Weltliteratur, are ascribed by Manfred Koch to the first phase of the postwar analysis of the term, which accentuates in particular the aspects of international understanding and internationalization. In this respect, we must observe a differentiation: Strich uses the traditional “national stereotypes” uncritically and notes that “Europe [arises as] a real haunted castle of national spirits” (7), while Schrimpf sees “the national clearly disappear into an enlightened internationalism with the help of world literature” (9). Strich sees in Goethe the “most important ancestor of the comparative examination of literature” (93) and finds that Goethe’s Weltliteratur is “the literature that mediates among nations, that makes them familiar with each other, the spiritual space where people meet and exchange their intellectual goods” (Strich 322).

The fact is that the frequency of comparative references is striking in Goethe’s conversation with Eckermann and the conversations give us the impression of Goethe as a continuous comparatist. Here is an example: within a period of only a few weeks, from November 1824 until the spring of 1825, we find many such entries characteristic of Goethe’s thinking. On 24 November 1824 he spoke of the preference for the formal in French literature in comparison to the superiority of subjects in German literature and evaluated the increased activity of translation from German to French as positive (Eckermann 96) and therefore they could benefit from German literature. On 3 December 1824 he dealt with Goldsmith, Fielding, and Shakespeare as reference points for all German novels and tragedies and estimated that English literature had taken the place of the classics for the younger generation of writers who were no longer familiar with the languages of antiquity (99). In the next paragraph he dealt with Dante (99) and the conversations of that day ended with comments on the flood disaster in St. Petersburg. On 10 January 1825 he was informed by an English visitor of the great interest of contemporary England in learning the German language and he emphasized that he himself had been occupied with the English language for fifty years (102); and on 18 January 1825 we find his thoughts about intertextual references, which he assessed as positive (107). What sounds like plagiarism by today’s standards is, in the case of Goethe, a bow to the superior art of his fellow writers.

The above examples demonstrate the extent of Goethe’s horizon and portray him both as a cosmopolitan in the sense of the Enlightenment and as a modern man who takes advantage of all the possibilities of information, brings the world to Weimar, and from Weimar influences the world. Within the scope of the technical possibilities of the time, Goethe already lived in a “network society” (Castells), dominated by a consciousness of similar worldwide processes in a technical as well as cultural respect, which was limited in terms of being “global” for it was more or less identical with the term “European,” but nonetheless already existing. In this sense, Goethe’s concept of Weltliteratur is a synthesis of the experience of the past and a project of the future:

how often Goethe compared the intellectual exchange of goods between nations with the material exchange, the trade, the world market, where the peoples brought their goods for exchange; this was not only a comparison, instead Goethe traced with really great attention how the trade among the nations, after the Napoleonic Wars, assisted by the ever accelerating pace of modern transportation, express mail, and steamships, developed itself into a world market, how the communication of the citizens of the world was advancing with unprecedented easiness. He spoke of a “velocity” century, of the “rotation” that was being brought about by such a speed of transport, of rolling time in this sense, and saw a developing world literature as an intellectual world trade between nations as a necessary and inevitable consequence of this rolling time, which brought the nations closer together and resulted in an indissoluble braiding and interlacing of their interests. (Strich 44)

If we replaced in the above quotation “world” with “global” and “steamships” and “express mail” with “airplanes” and “the internet,” we would suddenly stand before a description of the present, in which people have the feeling that they are witnessing a general acceleration, a cancellation of spatial distances, and technological innovations of unknown dimensions accompanied by a globally expanding communication and trade network. At the same time, this parallelization exemplifies a marked difference in the later theoretical configurations in that Strich speaks uncritically of a “communication euphoria” characteristic of the postwar period. Today, the world stands in sceptical distance from the innovations which take place in commerce, finance, and technology and is divided among vehement globalization opponents and proponents. In any event, Strich is certainly correct when he attributes to Goethe the awareness of living in a rapidly changing era, in the era of growing “world densification” (51). The knowledge of a new zeitgeist speaks through Goethe, a zeitgeist in which the radically new is to be discovered in scientific and technical progress. And Koch detects epochal similarities when he writes, “With all differences in the degree of the real expansion and compression of worldwide communication, we deal with a structurally single comprehensive process: such being the case, the issues raised in 1800 by wise observers have remained authoritative until today. No participant in the current globalisation debate can assert that the thoughts of authors such as Montesquieu, Smith, Kant, and also Goethe have become entirely obsolete” (14). In this respect, a point of connection for my project of NWL is found in the fact that the phenomena of Goethe’s age of “velocification” as he perceived them can be described as essentially cognate with the phenomena of the present.

Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre was published after several years of work in 1796 (the first mention of the project is dated 1777). In this novel Goethe undertakes a survey of the relation of an artistic self and its environment (see Werke 7: 683–85). He presents thoughts put into the mouth of Jarno that would well be described today by business buzzwords like “diversification of product range” or “risk management.” In the subsequent novel, Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre oder die Entsagenden (first full publication in 1829), Goethe examines in Lenardo’s diary cotton production along the Cotton Road, from Macedonia and Cyprus over Trieste to the Alps, where cotton is refined by spinners and then exported. In the course of this he draws a comparison with the quality of the cotton from East and West India, particularly with that of Cayenne (Werke 8: 339). Dark clouds gather over the traditional production and dealer network that is depicted, and the young entrepreneur finds himself facing a dilemma: he must either mechanize production and thus engulf entire valleys in unemployment and misery, or seek personal salvation through emigration to the US. What Goethe represents here is the gradual transition from manufacturing production to mechanical industrial labor, the negative consequences of this structural change being unemployment and the pauperization of entire regions. He also imagines multinational conglomerates with worldwide production and a trade network in which entrepreneurial risk is distributed across different locations and whose parts can counterbalance out one another financially. Thus Goethe anticipates in fiction what Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels shortly after write about the bourgeoisie in the Manifesto of the Communist Party.

Goethe, the philologist and writer, was anything but unworldly. On the contrary, he dealt throughout his life with economics which had then just come into fashion. And there is no doubt that he was good in financial matters: during his tenure as head of the Weimar financial administration “he took action for the drawing up and, where possible, also for the observance of a state budget” (Lauer 42). As for himself, he was conscious of his literary market value, mainly in the second half of his life (Lauer 53). Enrik Lauer examines in Literarischer Monetarismus—on the basis of Niklas Luhmann’s systems theoretical approach—Goethe’s “homology of spirit and money.” Lauer, who pays attention to the often disregarded financial aspects of literary production, finds Goethe to be innovative. Goethe, the homo oeconomicus, also had a sharp eye for the technical progress around him, which brought along improved transportation and communication possibilities and ensured a general cultural opening. The fact that traveling within Germany became gradually easier and less troublesome in Goethe’s era encouraged him to deliberate on how the project of a united Germany would encompass regional particularities (see Goethe in Eckermann 533). According to Goethe, the unification of Germany was first and foremost a practical matter, which would be resolved almost automatically by the increasing improvement of roads. Although Goethe’s reflections exhibit an almost prophetic character, it was not until the establishment of the German Zollverein (Customs Union) in 1834 and the final foundation of the German Reich in 1871 that unification was realized in the form of kleindeutsche Lösung (i.e., without Austria-Hungary). At the same time that Goethe favored the unity of a large part of the population he emphasized the advantages of the German Kleinstaaterei (proliferation of small states) (see Eckermann 553).

Goethe praised on numerous occasions the cultural progressiveness of the French and the English and contrasted them with German provinciality, but he was not blind to the opportunities inherent in German diversity, especially since—with the Parisian Globe or the English Edinburgh Review delivered at his doorstep—his possibilities for information were a direct consequence of the improved traffic conditions in Germany. Goethe’s Weltliteratur emerged from changes in the present as a project for the future and for this reason it is in contrast to the concept of Christoph Martin Wieland’s world literature and that Schmeling awards with “full credit for the formation of words” (Schmeling, “1st Weltliteratur” 162). While Wieland’s concept refers to the past, specifically to literature in the context of Horace, Weltliteratur in Goethe is read as a configuration conceived of in its making. This is made possible by the fact that Goethe conceived of a concept of literature that allows for entrenchment in more than one tradition. The relativization of his own position in the spirit of comparativism takes place in Goethe’s work on a synchronic as well as on a diachronic axis; we surely have to agree with Schmeling when he writes that “under the intellectual giants of this period in Germany—Wieland, Herder, Schiller, the Schlegels, and others— Goethe probably had acknowledged most clearly the social function of the cosmopolitan literary scene which expressed itself in the rapid proliferation of international periodicals and in the cross-border exchange of letters and translations” (Schmeling, “1st Weltliteratur” 162). Literature is primarily a cross-border communication, which is closely linked to specific technical capabilities. Goethe thus distances himself from his younger fellow writers, w...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter One: Goethe’s Weltliteratur and the Career of an Idea
• Chapter Two: Hybrid Literary Texts and Philological Paradigms
• Chapter Three: New World Literature and a Systemic Organization of Hybrid Fiction
• Chapter Four: Forms/Types of Poetic Multilingualism and Interferences, Metamultilingualism, and Transtextuality
• Chapter Five: Multilingualism as Poetic Strategy
• Chapter Six: Nomadic Biographies in New World Literature
• Chapter Seven: Transnational Spaces, Places, and Layers of Time
• Conclusion
• Works Cited
• Index