Handbook of Anglophone World Literatures

Stefan Helgesson, Birgit Neumann, Gabriele Rippl, Stefan Helgesson, Birgit Neumann, Gabriele Rippl

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9783110580846
• eBook ISBN: 9783110580945
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The Handbook of Anglophone World Literatures is the first globally comprehensive attempt to chart the rich field of world literatures in English. Part I navigates different usages of the term 'world literature' from an historical point of view. Part II discusses a range of theoretical and methodological approaches to world literature. This is also where the handbook's conceptualisation of 'Anglophone world literatures' – in the plural – is developed and interrogated in juxtaposition with proximate fields of inquiry such as postcolonialism, translation studies, memory studies and environmental humanities. Part III charts sociological approaches to Anglophone world literatures, considering their commodification, distribution, translation and canonisation on the international book market. Part IV, finally, is dedicated to the geographies of Anglophone world literatures and provides sample interpretations of literary texts written in English.

Part I: Historical Approaches – Genealogies of World Literatures

1 The Beginnings of the Concept (Goethe, Marx, Said) – Readings from a Postcolonial Perspective

Reingard Nethersole

Abstract

When Goethe popularized the essentially eighteenth-century cosmopolitan idea of world literature, Europe was still regarded as center of the universe. But post-Napoleonic era wars of national liberation fostered growing nationalistic sentiment in the nineteenth century while at the same time technological advances enabled speedier and easier transportation across borders, that enhanced commerce and communication. Inspired by industrial development, Goethe and Marx propagated world-wide cultural and economic expansion overcoming local narrow-­mindedness. And by embracing Auerbach’s philologically inflected and historically sensitive criticism, Said transformed our ways of thinking about literary voices from the former colonial empires, completely changing our ideas on how texts and images circulate, migrate and mutate in global interdependence.

Key Terms: Ansatzpunkt [point of departure], contrapuntal, philology, translation, Verkehr [traffic/commerce/communication/intercourse], wechselseitig [reciprocal, mutual, two-way], Weltliteratur,

1 Definition

For Goethe, the topos Weltliteratur signifies a structure of reciprocity, wechselseitige Annäherung [mutual adaptation and integration], of largely literary texts that, without effacing their individuality and historical concreteness, travel across state borders. The cultural, and often linguistic, differences of texts selected from sundry ages and regions are negotiated in forms of translation, appropriation and adaptation. The goal is “gaining knowledge of the mutual relations of all to all” (Goethe, Werke I, 42.2, 505, translated and qtd. in Birus 2000; in the following I shall utilize the Birus translations unless otherwise indicated). The ‘world,’ however, was for J.W. Goethe, but also for Karl Marx and Erich Auerbach, largely dominated by Europe. It was only with Edward Said’s embrace of the topos that the Eurocentric perspective changed significantly to include formerly colonized voices from around the globe. Its lineage, from Goethe (1749–1832) to Marx (1818–1883), Auerbach (1892–1957) and Said (1935–2003), coalesces at the point of contact with a foreign other, but in its actual encounter foregrounds different issues of aesthetic, social and economic concerns. Importantly, all four exponents bring a distinctive outsider eye to their engagement with the topos. Thus Jonathan Arac notes perceptively, albeit only in reference to Said: “the world of world literature requires a vividly concrete sense of geography and an acknowledgement both of large-scale relationships of political power and also of human-scale circumstances of individual lives” (2012, 119). Even Goethe, much traveled celebrity author and minister of state, in the 1820s felt estranged from small town Weimar, the cultural vector he himself had created in his youth. Meanwhile, journalist and political philosopher Marx had forcibly been exiled, first in Brussels and later in London; Auerbach, the Jewish scholar of Romance Philology, had to find refuge from Nazi persecution first in Istanbul (cf. Mufti 2012; Porter 2013; Said 2004a) and later in the United States, where the scholarly environment was not conducive to philological criticism. Said witnessed the end of colonialism and the dawn of globalization (cf. Mufti 1998; Lindenberger 2004; Arac 2012), an experience that for him, as Palestinian Protestant Arab exiled in North America, meant coming to terms with the Arab-Israeli conflict. In Said’s opinion, applicable to all four proponents, a life of exile is the manifestation of a “life led outside habitual order” (2004a, 186); its ‘estrangement’ effect allows a scholar to secure a certain critical distance from which it becomes possible to reimagine both home and the foreign culture without either falling for narrow-minded patriotism or identity politics.

1.1 Goethe and Marx

Weltliteratur envisaged by Goethe and Marx is literature circulated across nation-state borders in an international market place of ideas beyond time and space. Marx and Engels had no difficulty corroborating Goethe’s much quoted 1827 assertion: “National literature has not much meaning today: the epoch of world literature is at hand, and everyone must strive to hasten its approach” (Eckermann 1966, 153). In their Communist Manifesto published in German in London in 1848, Marx echoes the master’s assessment twenty years later by proclaiming in a similar vein:

In place of the old wants, satisfied by the productions of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency we have intercourse in every direction, universal interdependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-­mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures there arises a world literature.

(Marx and Engels 1994, 417)

Marx, like Goethe before him, underlines its shared “cosmopolitan character” (qtd. in Prawer 1976, 144), due to increased Verkehr [traffic, intercourse, communication] between nations. However, Weltliteratur, Goethe emphasizes, supersedes the kind of Weltpoesie [world poetry] Herder had extolled. Although, in conversation with his assistant Eckermann, on 31 January 1827, he acknowledges “poetry is a common ­heritage of mankind, and that it manifests itself at all places and times in hundreds and thousands of individuals. One of them writes a little better than another and floats on the surface a little longer than the other, that is all” (Eckermann 1966, 153). And even though Goethe recognizes how “the ever expanding” popular literature “pleases the masses,” something “we are already witnessing in all zones and regions” (Goethe, Werke I, 42.2, 1987, 502–503), he greets it ambiguously. Nevertheless, the aesthetically accomplished and exemplary work (“etwas Musterhaftem,” Eckermann 1987, 198) of the past remain for Goethe and Marx the measure of good literature, just as for Auerbach and Said. Thus, Goethe and Marx still prefer the timeless poetic achievements of the ‘ancients,’ the classical Greek and Roman authors, to contemporary writing like that of the German Romantics; Marx often critiques ‘modern’ writers for not sufficiently displaying social struggles in a historically valid, well-rounded realist manner.

1.2 Auerbach

Auerbach does not mention the term ‘world literature’ in his Mimesis, the much quoted magisterial study of Stiltrennung [stylistic separation] in respect of narrative representation of everyday life in its encounters with particular historical worlds displayed in European literature from Homer and the Bible to Virginia Woolf. However, Said celebrates it as a book that is “by far the largest in scope and ambition out of all the other important critical works of the past half century” (2004a, 12). In this “monumental work of literary intelligence” (Said 1983, 5), the polyglot Auerbach assembles a body of writing drawn from different European linguistic universes and key literary periods in order to demonstrate Goethe’s topos in ‘action’. As Said notes, “Auerbach’s Weltliteratur must be understood ‘not as a selective collection of world classics or great books […] but rather as a concert of all literature produced by man about man’” (qtd. in Arac 2012, 118). Auerbach himself states in the “autumnal, reflective” (Said 1983, 7) essay entitled “Philology and Weltliteratur”, written in honor of the Goethe scholar Fritz Strich in 1952: “‘World literature’ refers not simply to what is common and human [das Gemeinsame und Menschliche] as such, but rather to this as the mutual fertilisation of the manifold. It presupposes the felix culpa of mankind’s division into a whole host of cultures” (1967, 305). This remark resonates strongly with Goethe, who had stressed the need of gaining knowledge of “the peculiarities of each nation to then see past them and establish a relationship with the nation; for the characteristics of a nation are like its language and its coins; they facilitate dealings with it, in fact they make such dealings possible in the first place” (Goethe, Werke I, 41.2, 1987, 306). However, where Auerbach regards the diversity of national cultures as merely positive precondition for the formation of a common world literature, Goethe’s commercially tinged rhetoric not only precipitates Marx’s language but anticipates also the modern antagonism among different nation-states that can easily be rephrased as competition between producers and traders of cultural capital (Bourdieu 1984), something Pascale Casanova foregrounds in her 1999 Republique mondiale des lettres that, in its English translation The World Republic of Letters (2004), was met with fierce criticism (↗0 Introduction; ↗2 Re-Reading Classical Approaches).

1.3 Said

Auerbach’s life and work function as role model for Said; he is of “a like mind” (Said 2004a, 12). And it is Said’s critical handling of the topos fed by deep reverence for Auerbach and romanistische Philology [Romance Studies] that inspires his methodology of “secular criticism” (Said 1983, 1–30). Said assumed the “mantle” of Auerbach, claims Aamir Mufti, who sees evidence in “scattered references to Auerbach and his works throughout Said’s major critical writings from Beginnings onwards-to the tradition of German romance scholarship of which he was a representative” (1998, 97). Herbert Lindenberger concurs, specifically drawing attention to Said’s early “co-translation of ‘Philologie der Weltliteratur’ in 1969 to the introduction he wrote for an edition of Mimesis published in 2003 to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the book’s English translation” (2004, 47). Said adheres initially to Auerbach’s imagining of Goethean world literature in terms of a “concert of all literatures and ideas” (1983, 228). But, as Arac explains, “in his later work he developed [in his critical thinking] models that emphasized the plurality of ‘counterpoint’ rather than the unison of ‘concert’” (2012, 118). A contrapuntal view reframes Goethe’s topos grounded in Said’s insight that “Europe no longer commands the world” (Said 1993, 58). From that standpoint, Said shifts the geography and changes the cast of writers, undercutting any hitherto accepted ontological and normative definitions of world literature. Hence, he introduces perspectival change, arguing “[w]e need to see that the contemporary global setting – overlapping territories, intertwined histories – was already prefigured and inscribed in the coincidences and convergences among geography, culture, and history” (1993, 56). For “‘world literature’ to have any meaning at all”, Arac (2012, 124) repeats Said’s assertion from the final chapter of Culture and Imperialism: we need to accept “the actual configuration of literary experiences, overlapping with one another and independent, despite national boundaries and coercively legislated national autonomies” so as to transfigure “history and geography […] in new maps […] in new types of connections” (Said 1993, 317, qtd. in Arac 2012, 124). These speak to the experiences of exile, border crossings, and “charting new territories” (Said 1993, 317) as norm in a late industrial, neo-imperialist age.

2 Historical Aspects

The communicative success of the topos ‘world literature’ is premised largely on the role Comparative Literature played in its various differen...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• 0 Introduction
• Part I: Historical Approaches – Genealogies of World Literatures
• Part II: Concepts and Methods of Anglophone World Literatures
• Part III: Sociological Approaches – Distribution, Reception and Translation of Anglophone World Literature
• Part IV: Literary Worlds – Locations and Orientations
• Name Index
• Subject Index