World literature: Isn't that what Macksey taught?

Spence Lee Lenfield, A World of Literature, Harvard Magazine, October 2019.

Most scholars define themselves as specialists in one or two centuries of one or two regions; Damrosch’s work across time and space makes him an outlier. He says he tells people, “I work mostly on literature between roughly 2000 and 2015. But ‘2000’ means 2000 B.C.E.”

He is best known for his advocacy of “world literature,” which he defines in his (sensibly titled) 2003 book What Is World Literature? as “all literary works that circulate beyond their culture of origin, either in translation or in their original language.” This does not mean all literature ever created: some stays within the culture and language that produced it, and never leaves. World literature happens when Russian novels remake English literature; when a Turkish writer takes inspiration from a Colombian writer; when Japanese critics review translations of Lebanese poetry. It almost always involves re-interpretation and misunderstanding: a Spanish monk sent to suppress Aztec literature ended up disseminating it instead; subsequently, Aztec hymns envision a Christian God urging revolt against the Spaniards. World literature is also nothing new under the sun: Damrosch’s first book, Narrative Covenant, is about the influence of a range of Mesopotamian literatures from the first millennium B.C.E. on the composition of much of the Bible.

The field first gained traction in American universities around the turn of this century. Damrosch’s book appeared within a few years of works by two other scholars commonly tied to the concept: the late Pascale Casanova’s The World Republic of Letters and Franco Moretti’s article “Conjectures on World Literature.” Though their individual views differ, the three are often seen as the center of the new global focus in comparative literature. But Damrosch emphasizes that he doesn’t want world literature seen as a purely academic notion. “One of the things that’s interesting about [it] is that it didn’t come from elite graduate schools and percolate down, the way literary theory had,” he explains. “It’s much more bottom-up—from K-12 schools and community colleges, because they’re having these influxes of people from around the world, and they wanted to reach them. So they started teaching world-literature courses.”

H/t 3QD.