The origins of (the concept of) world literature

Martin Puchner, writing in Aeon:

On the afternoon of 31 January 1827, a new vision of literature was born. On that day, Johann Peter Eckermann, faithful secretary to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, went over to his master’s house, as he had done hundreds of times in the past three and a half years. Goethe reported that he had been reading Chinese Courtship (1824), a Chinese novel. ‘Really? That must have been rather strange!’ Eckermann exclaimed. ‘No, much less so than one thinks,’ Goethe replied.

A surprised Eckermann ventured that this Chinese novel must be exceptional. Wrong again. The master’s voice was stern: ‘Nothing could be further from the truth. The Chinese have thousands of them, and had them when our ancestors were still living in the trees.’ Then Goethe reached for the term that stunned his secretary: ‘The era of world literature is at hand, and everyone must contribute to accelerating it.’ World literature – the idea of world literature – was born out of this conversation in Weimar, a provincial German town of 7,000 people.

Later: "World literature originated as a solution to the dilemma Goethe faced as a provincial intellectual caught between metropolitan domination and nativist nationalism."

And then we have a passage from The Communist Manifesto (1848):

In a stunning paragraph from that text, the two authors celebrated the bourgeoisie for their role in sweeping away century-old feudal structures:

By exploiting the world market, the bourgeoisie has made production and consumption a cosmopolitan affair. To the annoyance of its enemies, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. … These industries no longer use local materials but raw materials drawn from the remotest zones, and its products are consumed not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. … In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have commerce in every direction, universal interdependence of nationals. 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 increasingly impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures there arises a world literature.

World literature­. To many contemporaries, it would have sounded like a strange term to use in the context of mines, steam engines and railways. Goethe would not have been surprised. Despite his aristocratic leanings, he knew that a new form of world market had made world literature possible.

Rolling along:

Ever since Goethe, Marx and Engels, world literature has rejected nationalism and colonialism in favour of a more just global community. In the second half of the 19th century, the Irish-born critic Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett championed world literature. Posnett developed his ideas of world literature in New Zealand. In Europe, the Hungarian Hugó Meltzl founded a journal dedicated to what he described as the ‘ideal’ of world literature.

In India, Rabindranath Tagore championed the same idealist model of world literature. Honouring the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, the two great Indian epics, Tagore nevertheless exhorted readers to think of literature as a single living organism, an interconnected whole without a centre. Having lived under European colonialism, Tagore saw world literature as a rebuke to colonialism.

After World War II:

In the US, world literature took up residence in the booming post-war colleges and universities. There, the expansion of higher education in the wake of the GI Bill helped world literature to find a home in general education courses. In response to this growing market, anthologies of world literature emerged. Some of Goethe’s favourites, such as the Sanskrit play Shakuntala, the Persian poet Hafez and Chinese novels, took pride of place. From the 1950s to the ’90s, world literature courses expanded significantly, as did the canon of works routinely taught in them. World literature anthologies, which began as single volumes, now typically reach some 6,000 pages. The six-volume Norton Anthology of World Literature (3rd ed, 2012), of which I am the general editor, is one of several examples.

In response to the growth of world literature over the past 20 years, an emerging field of world literature research including sourcebooks and companions have created a scholarly canon, beginning with Goethe, Marx and Engels and through to Tagore, Auerbach and beyond. The World Literature Institute at Harvard University, headed by the scholar David Damrosch, spends two out of three summers in other locations.

And now:

Today, with nativism and nationalism surging in the US and elsewhere, world literature is again an urgent and political endeavour. Above all, it represents a rejection of national nativism and colonialism in favour of a more humane and cosmopolitan order, as Goethe and Tagore had envisioned. World literature welcomes globalisation, but without homogenisation, celebrating, along with Ravitch, the small, diasporic literatures such as Yiddish as invaluable cultural resources that persevere in the face of prosecution and forced migration.

There is no denying that world literature is a market, one in which local and national literatures can meet and transform each other. World literature depends, above all, on circulation. This means that it is incompatible with efforts to freeze or codify literature into a set canon of metropolitan centres, or of nation states, or of untranslatable originals. True, the market in world literature is uneven and not always fair. But the solution to this problem is not less circulation, less translation, less world literature. The solution is a more vibrant translation culture, more translations into more languages, and more world literature education.

The free circulation of literature is the best weapon against nationalism and colonialism, whether old or new, because literature, even in translation, gives us unique access to different cultures and the minds of others.