World literature is used to refer to the total of the world's national literature and the circulation of works into the wider world beyond their country of origin. In the past, it primarily referred to the masterpieces of Western European literature; however, world literature today is increasingly seen in an international context. Now, readers have access to a wide range of global works in various translations.
Many scholars assert that what makes a work considered world literature is its circulation beyond its country of origin. For example, Damrosch states, "A work enters into world literature by a double process: first, by being read as literature; second, by circulating out into a broader world beyond its linguistic and cultural point of origin". Likewise, the world literature scholar Venkat Mani believes that the "worlding" of literature is brought about by "
information transfer
In telecommunications, information transfer is the process of moving messages containing user information from a source to a sink via a communication channel. In this sense, information transfer is equivalent to data transmission which highlights ...
" largely generated by developments in print culture. Because of the advent of the library, "Publishers and
booksellers
Bookselling is the commercial trading of books which is the retail and distribution end of the publishing process. People who engage in bookselling are called booksellers, bookdealers, bookpeople, bookmen, or bookwomen. The founding of librari ...
who print and sell affordable books, literate citizens who acquire these books, and public libraries that make these books available to those who cannot afford to buy them collectively play a very important role in the "making" of world literature".
History
Johann Wolfgang Goethe
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (28 August 1749 – 22 March 1832) was a German poet, playwright, novelist, scientist, statesman, theatre director, and critic. His works include plays, poetry, literature, and aesthetic criticism, as well as treati ...
used the concept of Weltliteratur in several of his essays in the early decades of the nineteenth century to describe the international circulation and reception of literary works in Europe, including works of non-Western origin. The concept achieved wide currency after his disciple
Johann Peter Eckermann
Johann Peter Eckermann (21 September 1792 – 3 December 1854), German poet and author, is best known for his work '' Conversations with Goethe'', the fruit of his association with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe during the last years of Goethe's life ...
published a collection of conversations with Goethe in 1835.Johann Peter Eckermann, ''Gespräche mit Goethe in den letzten Jahren seines Lebens'', trans. John Oxenford as J. W. von Goethe, ''Conversations with Eckermann'', repr. North Point Press, 1994. Goethe spoke with Eckermann about the excitement of reading Chinese novels and Persian and Serbian poetry as well as of his fascination with seeing how his own works were translated and discussed abroad, especially in France. He made a famous statement in January 1827, predicting that world literature would replace the national literature as the major mode of literary creativity in the future:
Reflecting a fundamentally economic understanding of world literature as a process of trade and exchange,
Karl Marx
Karl Heinrich Marx (; 5 May 1818 – 14 March 1883) was a German philosopher, economist, historian, sociologist, political theorist, journalist, critic of political economy, and socialist revolutionary. His best-known titles are the 1848 ...
bourgeois
The bourgeoisie ( , ) is a social class, equivalent to the middle or upper middle class. They are distinguished from, and traditionally contrasted with, the proletariat by their affluence, and their great cultural and financial capital. They ...
literary production, asserting that:
Martin Puchner Martin Puchner is a literary critic and philosopher. He studied at Konstanz University, the University of Bologna, and the University of California, Santa Barbara, before receiving his Ph.D. at Harvard University. Until 2009 he held the H. Gordon G ...
has stated that Goethe had a keen sense of world literature as driven by a new world market in literature. This market-based approach was sought by Marx and Engels in 1848 through their ''Manifesto'' document, which was published in four languages and distributed among several European countries, and has since become one of the most influential texts of the twentieth century. While Marx and Engels followed Goethe in viewing world literature as a modern or future phenomenon, in 1886 the Irish scholar H. M. Posnett argued that world literature first arose in ancient empires, such as the Roman Empire, long before the rise of the modern national literature. Today, world literature is understood to encompass classical works from all periods, including contemporary literature that is written for a global audience.
In the postwar era, the study of comparative and world literature was revived in the United States. Comparative literature was seen at the graduate level while world literature was taught as a first-year general education class. The focus remained largely on the Greek and Roman classics and the literature of major, modern Western-European powers, but a combination of factors in the late 1980s and early 1990s led to greater access to the world. The end of the Cold War, the growing globalization of the world economy, and new waves of immigration led to several efforts to expand the study of world literature. This change is illustrated by the expansion of ''The Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces'', whose first edition in 1956 featured only Western-European and North American works, to a new "expanded edition" in 1995 with non-Western selections. Major survey anthologies today, including those published by Longman, Bedford and Norton, showcase several hundred authors from dozens of countries.
Contemporary understandings
The explosive growth in the range of cultures studied under the rubric of world literature has inspired a variety of theoretical attempts to define the field and to propose effective modes of research and teaching. In his 2003 book ''What Is World Literature?'' David Damrosch understands world literature to be less of a vast collection of works and more a matter of circulation and reception. He proposed that works that thrive as world literature are ones that work well and even gain meaning through translation. Whereas Damrosch's approach remains tied to the close reading of individual works, a different view was taken by the Stanford critic
Franco Moretti Franco Moretti (born 1950 in Sondrio) is an Italian literary historian and theorist. He graduated in Modern Literatures from the University of Rome in 1972. He has taught at the universities of Salerno (1979–1983) and Verona (1983–1990); in th ...
in a pair of articles offering "Conjectures on World Literature". Moretti believes that the scale of world literature exceeds what can be grasped by traditional methods of close reading, and advocates instead a mode of "distant reading" that would look at large-scale patterns as discerned from publication records and national literary histories.
Moretti's approach combined elements of evolutionary theory with the world-systems analysis pioneered by
Immanuel Wallerstein
Immanuel Maurice Wallerstein (; September 28, 1930 – August 31, 2019) was an American sociologist and economic historian. He is perhaps best known for his development of the general approach in sociology which led to the emergence of his wor ...
, an approach further discussed since then by Emily Apter in her influential book ''The Translation Zone''. Related to their world-systems approach is the work of French critic Pascale Casanova, ''La République mondiale des lettres'' (1999). Drawing on the theories of cultural production developed by the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, Casanova explores the ways in which the works of peripheral writers must circulate into metropolitan centers in order to achieve recognition as being world literature.
The field of world literature continues to generate debate, with critics such as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak arguing that too often the study of world literature in translation smooths out both the linguistic richness of the original and the political force a work can have in its original context. Other scholars, on the contrary, emphasize that world literature can and should be studied with close attention to original languages and contexts, even as works take on new dimensions and new meanings abroad.
World literature series are now being published in China and in Estonia, and a new Institute for World Literature, offering month-long summer sessions on theory and pedagogy, had its inaugural session at Peking University in 2011, with its next sessions at Istanbul Bilgi University in 2012 and at Harvard University in 2013. Since the middle of the first decade of the new century, a steady stream of works has provided materials for the study of the history of world literature and the current debates. Valuable collections of essays include:
* Manfred Schmeling, ''Weltliteratur Heute'' (1995)
* Christopher Prendergast, ''Debating World Literature'' (2004)
*
David Damrosch
David Damrosch is an American literary historian, was born in Maine and raised there and in New York , currently the Ernest Bernbaum Professor at Harvard University and an Elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.
Damrosch studie ...
, ''Teaching World Literature'' (2009)
* Theo D'haen's co-edited collections ''The Routledge Companion to World Literature'' (2011) and ''World Literature: A Reader'' (2012).
Individual studies include:
*Moretti, ''Maps, Graphs, Trees'' (2005)
*John Pizer, ''The Idea of World Literature'' (2006),
* Mads Rosendahl Thomsen, ''Mapping World Literature'' (2008)
*Theo D'haen, ''The Routledge Concise History of World Literature'' (2011)
* Tötösy de Zepetnek, Steven, and
Tutun Mukherjee Tutun may refer to:
* Tebtunis, Egyptian city
* Turkish tobacco
Turkish tobacco, or Oriental tobacco, is a highly aromatic, small-leafed variety of tobacco which is sun-cured.
Turkish tobacco plants usually have a greater number and smaller size ...
, eds. ''Companion to Comparative Literature, World Literatures, and Comparative Cultural Studies'' (2013).
Publishers
American publishers neglect to publish the work of world literature. Surveys by the
National Endowment for the Arts
The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) is an independent agency of the United States federal government that offers support and funding for projects exhibiting artistic excellence. It was created in 1965 as an independent agency of the federal ...
Literature Program showed that only 297 translated books were published in the United States, out of 13,000 works of fiction and poetry published in the United States in 1999. As of 2019, only 3% of all books published in the United States are works in translation, compared to Italy, where translations represent more than 50% of titles published. Among the literary magazines that dedicate to world literature is ''
World Literature Today
''World Literature Today'' is an American magazine of international literature and culture, published at the University of Oklahoma. The stated goal of the magazine is to publish international essays, poetry, fiction, interviews, and book revie ...
'' (founded in 1970), which sponsors The Neustadt award.
See also
Notes
Further reading
*Boruszko, Graciela, and Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek, eds "New Work about World Literatures". Special Issue ''CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture'' 15.6 (2013)]
*Casanova, Pascale. ''The World Republic of Letters''. Trans. M. B. DeBevoise. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004.
*D'haen, Theo. ''The Routledge Concise History of World Literature''. London: Routledge, 2011.
*D'haen, Theo, David Damrosch, and Djelal Kadir, eds. ''The Routledge Companion to World Literature''. London: Routledge, 2011.
*D'haen, Theo César Domínguez and Mads Rosendahl Thomsen, eds. ''World Literature: A Reader''. London: Routledge, 2012.
*Damrosch, David. ''How to Read World Literature''. London: Blackwell, 2009.
*Damrosch, David. ''What Is World Literature?'' Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003.
*Damrosch, David, April Alliston, Marshall Brown, Page duBois, Sabry Hafez, Ursula K. Heise, Djelal Kadir, David L. Pike, Sheldon Pollock, Bruce Robbins, Haruo Shirane, Jane Tylus, and Pauline Yu, eds. ''The Longman Anthology of World Literature''. New York: Pearson Longman, 2009. 6 Vols.
*Davis, Paul, John F. Crawford, Gary Harrison, David M. Johnson, and Patricia Clark Smith, eds. ''The Bedford Anthology of World Literature''. New York: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2004. 6 Vols. Domínguez, César"Gualterio Escoto: A Writer across World-Literatures" ''Translation and World Literature''. Ed. Susan Bassnett. London: Routledge, 2019. 75–91.
*Goßens, Peter. ''Weltliteratur. Modelle transnationaler Literaturwahrnehmung im 19. Jahrhundert''. Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler, 2011.
*Hashmi, Alamgir. ''The Commonwealth, Comparative Literature, and the World''. Islamabad: Indus Books, 1988.
*Juvan, Marko, ed "World Literatures from the Nineteenth to the Twenty-first Century" Special Issue ''CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture'' 15.5 (2013)
*Juvan, Marko. Worlding a Peripheral Literature '. Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. .
*Lawall, Sarah, ed. ''Reading World Literature: Theory, History, Practice''. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994.
*Pizer, John. ''The Idea of World Literature: History and Pedagogical Practice''. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006.
*Prendergast, Christopher, ed. ''Debating World Literature''. London: Verso, 2004.
*Puchner, Martin, Suzanne Conklin Akbari, Wiebke Denecke, Vinay Dharwadker, Barbara Fuchs, Caroline Levine, Sarah Lawall, Pericles Lewis, and Emily Wilson, eds. ''The Norton Anthology of World Literature''. New York: W. W. Norton, 2012. Six vols.
*Rothenberg, Jerome, and Pierre Joris, eds. ''Poems for the Millennium: A Global Anthology''. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. 2 Vols.
*Sturm-Trigonakis, Elke. ''Comparative Cultural Studies and the New Weltliteratur''. West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2013.
*Tanoukhi, Nirvana. "The Scale of World Literature". New Literary History 39.3 (2008).
*Thomsen, Mads Rosendahl. ''Mapping World Literature: International Canonization and Transnational Literatures''. London: Continuum, 2008.
*Tötösy de Zepetnek, Steven Multilingual Bibliography of (Text)Books in Comparative Literature, World Literature(s), and Comparative Cultural Studies" ''CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture'' (''Library'') (March 1, 1999; updated 2020)
*Tötösy de Zepetnek, Steven, and Tutun Mukherjee, eds. ''Companion to Comparative Literature, World Literatures, and Comparative Cultural Studies''. New Delhi: Cambridge University Press India, 2013.
*Vipper, Yuri B. "A Fundamental Study of the History of World Literature". USSR Academy of Sciences: ''Social Sciences'' Vol. XVI, No. 1, 1985 pp. 84–93.
*Vipper, Yuri B. "National Literary History in History of World Literature: Theoretical Principles of Treatment". ''New Literary History'' Vol. 16, No. 3, On Writing Histories of Literature (Spring 1985), pp. 545–558. .