World Literature - Contemporary Understandings

Contemporary Understandings

Over the course of the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, the rising tide of nationalism led to an eclipse of interest in world literature, but in the postwar era, comparative and world literature began to enjoy a resurgence in the United States. As a nation of immigrants, and with a less well established national tradition than many older countries possessed, the United States became a thriving site for the study of comparative literature (often primarily at the graduate level) and of world literature, often taught as a first-year general education class. The focus remained largely on the Greek and Roman classics and the literatures of the major modern Western European powers, but a confluence of factors in the late 1980s and early 1990s led to a greater openness to the wider world. The end of the Cold War, the growing globalization of the world economy, and new waves of immigration from many parts of the world led to several efforts to open out the study of world literature. This change is well illustrated by the expansion of The Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces, whose first edition of 1956 featured only Western European and North American works, to a new “expanded edition” of 1995 with substantial non-Western selections, and with the title changed from “masterpieces” to the less exclusive “Literature.” The major survey anthologies today, including those published by Longman and by Bedford in addition to Norton, all showcase several hundred authors from dozens of countries.

The explosive growth in the range of cultures studied under the rubric of world literature has inspired a variety of theoretical attempts to define and delimit the field and to propose effective modes of research and teaching. In his 2003 book What Is World Literature? David Damrosch argued for world literature as less a vast canon of works and more a matter of circulation and reception, and he proposed that works that thrive as world literature are ones that work well and even gain in various ways in translation. Whereas Damrosch’s approach remains tied to the close reading of individual works, a very different view was taken by the Stanford critic Franco Moretti in a pair of articles offering “Conjectures on World Literature.” Moretti argued that the scale of world literature far exceeds what can be grasped by traditional methods of close reading, and he advocated instead a mode of “distant reading” that would look at large-scale patterns as discerned from publication records and national literary histories, enabling one to trace the global sweep of forms such as the novel or film.

Moretti’s approach combined elements of evolutionary theory with the world-systems analysis pioneered by Immanuel Wallerstein, an approach further discussed since then by Emily Apter in her influential book The Translation Zone. Related to their world-systems approach is the major 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 works of world literature. Both Moretti and Casanova emphasize the inequalities of the global literary field, which Moretti describes as “one, but unequal.”

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. Once a primarily European and American concern, world literature is now actively studied and discussed in many parts of the world. 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, Teaching World Literature (2009), and 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), and Theo D'haen, The Routledge Concise History of World Literature (2011).