What is World Literature by David Damrosch Review by Bruce Krajewski
description
Transcript of What is World Literature by David Damrosch Review by Bruce Krajewski
What Is World Literature? by David DamroschReview by: Bruce KrajewskiCollege Literature, Vol. 32, No. 4 (Fall, 2005), pp. 234-236Published by: College LiteratureStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25115319 .
Accessed: 05/11/2013 15:48
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].
.
College Literature is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to College Literature.
http://www.jstor.org
This content downloaded from 128.148.252.35 on Tue, 5 Nov 2013 15:48:33 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
234 College Literature 32.4 [Fall 2005]
between several simultaneous audiences, finding ways to speak to the world
without sacrificing relevance to the village. Overall, Light Motives is among the books that mark a turning-point in
the reception of German cinema abroad, a reception in which, somewhat
paradoxically, highly idiosyncratic filmmakers like Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Wim Wenders, and Werner Herzog were often taken as representative of
German cinema. Halle's and McCarthy's Light Motives corrects this imbal
ance. It provides critical discussion of an aspect of German culture that used
to be of interest to a small community of experts on German culture, and as
it expands this community it invites a broader audience interested in popu lar film to join the discussion.
Damrosch, David. 2003. What Is World Literature? Princeton: Princeton University Press. $65.00 he. $22.95 sc. xiii + 324 pp.
Bruce Krajewski
Texas Woman s University
The large umbrella category in the title of David Damrosch's What Is World
Literature? permits its author to complete one mental jet? after the other as
if it were all part of the same dance, ? la Gene Kelly's famous rain routine.
The book's choreography is choppy, chronologically and otherwise; howev
er, its topic is something that literary folks have only begun to think through, and hardly anyone is able to dance through the program gracefully.
Nonetheless, Damrosch is willing to ask some questions about the dance that
moves continually from the sidewalk into the street and back again. Another strong point of this book can be found in its insistence on
incompleteness, an acknowledgment that no one is in a position to provide a full context for a text, especially ones from other cultures, from other lan
guages. As we have known at least since Walter Benjamin, history, which
includes world literature, is mediated, most often by those whose interests
influence the reports. Reading is an insufficient condition for understanding
This content downloaded from 128.148.252.35 on Tue, 5 Nov 2013 15:48:33 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Book Reviews 235
history and acting upon it. Perhaps the best we can hope for are readers who
know that they are partisan and non-omniscient, not that this is the best for
which Damrosch hopes. His allegiance is to "detached engagement." Damrosch wants to have his culture and oppose it too?at least by ges
turing in a direction that might be interpreted as oppositional. He begins What Is World Literature? with an epigraph from The Communist Manifesto,
cgusing at least one reader to think the Manifesto and its critique of capital ism must have special significance for the author (the quotation comes from
volume 50 of Great Books of the Western World according to Damrosch's bib
liography), but The Communist Manifesto never comes up again in Damrosch's
book. Now that's detached engagement. The randomness of topics and texts in Damrosch's philosophically inno
cent book illustrates the amorphousness of world literature, as well as its
strength as a vehicle for promoting multiculturalism. We have semi-inde
pendent chapters on Mechthild von Magdeburg, on Johann Wolfgang von
Goethe and Johann Peter Eckermann, on Franz Kafka, on Rigoberta
Menchu, and on Milorad Pavi?, among others. Damrosch's definition of
world literature does not delimit the category to something functional: "I
take world literature to encompass all literary works that circulate beyond their culture of origin, either in translation or in their original language" (4).
His statement requires that he define literature, and he does not tackle that
vexed issue. Damrosch's aims are mostly
not about the "what," but about the
"how"; he is concerned mainly with method. He wants to clarify "the ways in which works of literature can best be read" (5).
Damrosch, at times, endorses canons but is not prepared
to spell
out what
distinguishes literature from great literature or from great world literature.
One place where readers witness Damrosch's allegiance to a highbrow/low brow dichotomy is when he tells us, "Perhaps we need to think of this poem
[a love lyric from ancient Egypt] less in a context of Heinrich Heine and
William Shakespeare and more in a context of Willie Nelson and Linda
Ronstadt" (156). Also, Damrosch is willing to talk about literary hierarchies, for instance, in his comments about some Aztec poetry. "Not all of these
poems are likely ever to register as true literature ..." (86-87). Subsequently, he moves closer to taking the reader toward an answer: "Great works of lit
erature do have a transcendent quality that enables them to reach across time
and space and speak directly to us today" (135). What is this "transcendent
quality"? Since we are talking about written works, often works in other
languages, in what sense can they speak "directly"? They speak directly when
they sound the same as the reader, when the text mirrors the reader's con
cerns, the reader's politics, the reader's Weltanschauung. Call this a version of
"identity politics," or what Emmanuel Levinas would call the world reduced
This content downloaded from 128.148.252.35 on Tue, 5 Nov 2013 15:48:33 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
236 College Literature 32.4 [Fall 2005]
to the Same. Why would we be reading texts that do not want to speak to
(about) us? Yet, those might be some of the most interesting and important texts (politically), the ones that are esoteric, unsettling, not meant for us, hid
den, meant for insiders, like Friedrich Nietzsche's Nachlass, cryptograms, or
classified government documents.
Make no mistake about Damrosch's inconsistency on this point. Damrosch also writes that "world literature is not a set canon of texts but a
mode of reading: a form of detached engagement with worlds beyond our
own place and time" (281). In another place, Damrosch will claim that we
ought not to read texts monologically (in the sense of employing a single model of rationality). His emphasis on detached engagement belies his insistence
elsewhere that no single path to proper reading exists.
Why are some works translated, and others not? Surely, Damrosch does
not believe an answer rests solely in the realm of aesthetics or epistemology, with some works more "transcendent" than others or some more
"true"?the kind of reading for "pleasure" and "enlightenment" that comes
fully onto the stage late in the book (303). World Literature courses contin
ue at state-sponsored universities mostly without question, for the courses'
mall-like qualities fit nicely into the capitalistic culture where Damrosch
thrives in a not-so-detached relationship with an economy that supports World Literature courses, mostly as another strategy toward globalization.
This content downloaded from 128.148.252.35 on Tue, 5 Nov 2013 15:48:33 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions