World Literature: The Unbearable Lightness of Thinking Globally.

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Diaspora 12:1 2003

World Literature: The UnbearableLightness of Thinking Globally1

Gregory JusdanisThe Ohio State University

1.

Does literature have anything interesting to say about globaliza-tion? Is the work of literary critics germane to those analyzingtoday’s transnational flows of people, ideas, and goods? Manystudents of globalization, who work primarily in economics, politicalscience, cultural studies, and journalism, would be skeptical of theclaim that literary study could address their concerns. Indeed, theywould be surprised to learn that Comparative Literature has beenchampioning cosmopolitanism for more than a century, or that ithad developed an international perspective on literary relationsdecades before they had. Comparative Literature, in fact, prefiguredtoday’s transnational consciousness through its attempt to tran-scend the limits of individual national traditions and to investigatelinks among them.

This makes the current malaise of Comparative Literature baf-fling. A discipline that promoted polyglossia and comparison for 100years now finds itself in decline. Rather than emerging as a leadinglight in an academy so preoccupied with interdisciplinarity anddifference, Comparative Literature has lost its glow. Most alarmingof all, it has allowed English, Cultural Studies, and GlobalizationStudies to pursue a scorched-earth policy with respect to foreignlanguages. The discipline that spearheaded transnationalism in thehumanities now finds itself in the rear guard.

With some justification, Gayatri Spivak speaks of the death ofthe discipline. Her book, like so many studies of Comparative Lite-rature today, is written in an elegiac tone. So persuaded are criticsof Comparative Literature’s demise that they have resurrected theidea of world literature as a way of analyzing global literaryproduction. To be sure, the proliferation of courses in and antholo-gies and studies of world literature all seems to indicate the rise ofa fresh, more up-to-date approach to the study of the literatures ofthe globe. But is world literature really that novel? Or is it a caseof old software in new computers? Has it learned from the lessonsxxxxxxxxxxxx

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of Comparative Literature, the discipline it seeks to replace, or isit destined to repeat its errors?

In order to address these questions, I need to consider briefly andat the outset the ideology and history of Comparative Literature. Atthe very heart of Comparative Literature is the promotion of thecomparison of various traditions, close reading of texts, polyglossia,and ecumenicity. Indeed, if one looks at the texts inaugurating thediscipline, one finds two justifications for the new project: the desireto understand the connections between literary traditions in the ori-ginal languages and a defense of cosmopolitanism.2 While these mayseem self-evident truths today, a sign no doubt of the successfulconsolidation of the discipline’s central message, they were not soin the nineteenth century, which witnessed the rise of the variousnational literatures in Europe as objects of disciplinary study.

Early comparatists responded to the compartmentalization of En-lightenment letters by seeking links among these traditions.3 Inwhat is perhaps the first presentation of comparative literature inthe United States, Charles Chauncey Shackford wrote that all“great poems” are “structurally and vitally related” (42). The taskof Comparative Literature was to trace the analogies betweentraditions and identify the peculiarities of each (48). Joseph Texte,a French critic and pioneer of the discipline, contended that, sinceEuropean literature had borrowed from the “ancient literatures ofthe Orient, of Greece, and of Rome,” it was imperative for the “his-torian of modern literatures” to study “their mutual relationship”(110). The comparative study of literature is necessary, Louis PaulBetz insisted, because no national literature had emerged on itsown (148). A half-century later, René Wellek reaffirmed thisposition, namely, that the “great argument for ‘comparativeliterature’ is the obvious falsity of the idea of a self-enclosednational literature” (“The Concept” 5).

Not satisfied to look for affinities between literatures, thesecritics often discovered totalities, at least in Europe. In an influen-tial text tellingly titled “La littérature européenne,” the greatFrench critic Ferdinand Brunetière spoke of a “European literature”that subsumed all the national literatures into one category (1–5,49–51). He and other critics offered the idea of general literature towhich all national literatures belonged. Writing at the same timeon the literary traditions of Western Europe, Frédéric Loliée pro-posed that, although distinct in origin and character, these lite-ratures constitute an “all embracing unity” (358). In response to thefencing practices of national literatures, comparatists rushed toprove that European literatures embraced the same aesthetic prin-ciples. Wellek insisted that “Western literature, at least, forms aunity, a whole.” “Literature,” he argued, “is one, as art and hu-manity are one” (“The Concept” 5).

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Comparative Literature and World Literature

This construction of unified bodies of textuality, however, turnedout to be one of the fatal errors of the discipline. On the one hand,the ultimate goal of these critics was to transcend division by re-constructing the idea, prevalent for centuries, that poetry was auniversal construct.4 On the other hand, the creation of totalitiesresulted in a celebration of western European literatures at theexpense of other traditions that undermined the very transnational-ism Comparative Literature sought to promote.

To be sure, one of the reasons people today have become disen-chanted with Comparative Literature is that it failed to live up toits own ideals. Unlike Goethe, who packed texts ranging from Ser-bian epics to Chinese novels into his notion of world literature, thepractitioners of Comparative Literature confined themselves toEurope. Brunetière, for instance, saw little point in looking forrelations between Western and other literatures (3). Goethe’s capa-cious world literature had in time become a collection of master-pieces. Following this logic, the American critic Robert J. Clementsconcluded that because African authors have contributed fewerworks fulfilling the “criteria of international acclaim,” they wouldplay a “minor role” in the curricula of comparative literature (32).5

It is often forgotten, however, that this perspective did not includeall of Europe in its compass. I have argued elsewhere (Belated 2–3)that Comparative Literature was primarily interested in the litera-tures of Britain, France, and Germany, paying secondary attentionto the traditions of Italy, Russia, and Spain, and making passingreference to the others.

In addition to its restricted cosmopolitanism—which world litera-ture tries toredress—ComparativeLiteraturesuffered fromtheoreti-cal vagueness. This was apparent even in the birth of the discipline.In an early essay, “The Comparative Study of Literature,” ArthurRichmond Marsh attempted to outline the comparative method toPMLA readers in 1896. The task of comparative literature, he ex-plained, was to examine “the phenomena of literature as a whole,to compare them, to group them, to classify them” (128). But hecautioned that the methods of these procedures had not at that timebeen “systematically formulated.” As a result, comparative litera-ture remained “underdeveloped in theory and limited in practice”(126). More than fifty years later, Wellek came to a similar con-clusion. Despite landmark works in French, German, and English,the discipline was in a “precarious state,” incapable of establishinga “distinct subject matter and specific methodology” (Concepts 282).Ten years after Wellek, Hans-Joachim Schulz and Phillip H. Rheingrumbled about the difficulties of practicing comparative literatureand about the absence of disciplinary identity (vii).6

The reason for this lack of clarity lies in the very concept andpractice of literary comparison. There has been agreement that thexxxxxxxxxxxx

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basic method of the discipline is to compare works of literature fromdifferent traditions. Paul Van Tieghem stated this emphatically in1931 in La littérature comparée, generally regarded as the firsttheoretical treatment of the subject (57). But what does comparisonof diverse literary traditions actually mean? The search for sources?The detection of influences? The isolation of peculiarities? Theexamination of parallel structures? At various stages, it has meantall of the above. But on what basis could these diverse phenomenabe compared? In other words, on what table could these features belaid out, examined, and systematized?

Early practitioners borrowed the comparative approach from thenatural sciences with the intent of making it an exact science.Marsh, for instance, pointed out that comparatists had appropriatedthis methodology from comparative anatomy, language studies, andthe sciences (126). By acquiring this methodology, Posnett believed,literary study would become a science itself (235).7 These earlytheorists failed to note differences between the two approaches. Thepurpose of comparison in the sciences is to look at difference, tonote traces of underlying similarity, to place like with like (evenwhen surfaces look un-alike), and to lay the foundation not just forsynchronic categorization (Linnaeus) but also for historical develop-ment (Darwin). But literary texts do not stem from one source inthe way that human beings or even languages do. Forgetting this,many comparatists spent their time trying to prove descent by look-ing for points of origin and tracing influences of one author on an-other. The metaphor they provided to illustrate their disciplinarywork was the tree.

Comparative Literature, as Haun Saussy has shown, was or-ganized around the logic of “tree-shaped” disciplines of comparativeanatomy and philology that explained typological diversity througha common historical narrative with many boughs (137). But lite-rature lacks the shared anatomical body or trunk of one language.Modern Greek literature is not to ancient Greek literature asmodern demotic is to classical Greek. When Constantine Cavafy,James Joyce, or Derek Walcott return to Homer, the relationshipthey establish between themselves and the original text, and amongthemselves as modern readers of an ancient epic, is one not ofshared descent but of shared interest. The Odyssey does not leadineluctably to Tennyson’s “Ulysses.”

Although Comparative Literature developed sophisticated me-thodologies for reading texts, it never succeeded in building a soundtheoretical base. This theoretical instability has been aggravated byrecent calls for it to abandon the discipline’s primary preoccupationwith literature so as to resemble Cultural Studies. For example, thethird report of the American Comparative Literature Association,xxxxxxxxxxxx

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chaired by Charles Bernheimer in 1993, has broadened the field ofcomparison to such an extent that it is in danger of losing its focuson literature.8 This is also true of Spivak’s attempt to revive thediscipline by fostering collaboration with Area Studies (9). Non-specialists might wonder what the objectives of ComparativeLiterature actually are.

Given the theoretical aporias of Comparative Literature, its ves-tiges of Eurocentrism, and its lack of disciplinary identity, it isunderstandable that critics are seeing in world literature a meansof making sense of literary relations and of organizing the under-graduate curriculum. It is fitting here to ask whether world litera-ture can rise to the occasion: Has it really overcome the two mainproblems of Comparative Literature—limited transnationalism andtheoretical vagueness?

In order to address these questions, it will be helpful to returnto Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s (1749–1832) introduction of thisterm. Rather than writing a treatise on the subject, Goethe actuallytossed out this concept to his disciple, Johann Peter Eckermann(1792–1854), who had arrived in Weimar in 1823 for an audiencewith the great man and stayed as his private secretary until themaster’s death. Having transcribed his conversations with Goethe,he published them in two volumes in 1836. The exchanges betweenthem, imbalanced by Goethe’s age and international status, some-what resemble the tête-à-tête talk between the two protagonists inLouis Malle’s film My Dinner with André or the dialogues betweenSocrates and his hapless interlocutors. Goethe’s wisdom, urbanity,and immeasurable knowledge nearly silence the young Eckermanninto acquiescent adoration.

The conversation of 31 January 1827 began with Goethe’s com-ment on a Chinese novel he had been reading. “Chinese novel!”Eckerman uttered with surprise; “that must look strange enough.”Not so, answered Goethe; “the Chinese think, act, and feel almostexactly like us.” What had enabled Goethe to make this juxtaposi-tion of the two texts was his belief in a shared humanity, a productof Enlightenment universalism. Goethe then compared this novelwith the Chansons de Béranger, asking Eckermann whether it wasnot remarkable that the Chinese text was so moral and the Frenchtext exactly the opposite. Then, as another expression of his cos-mopolitanism, Goethe remarked that the Chinese had composedmany such romances at a time when his German ancestors “werestill living in the woods.” Regarding poetry as a “universal pos-session of mankind,” Goethe worried that Germans might easily fallinto a conceit, not looking “beyond the narrow circle that surroundus.” Then he uttered that magic statement that has propelled athousand pens: “I therefore like to look about me in foreign nations,xxxxxxxxxxxx

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and advise everyone to do the same. National literature is nowrather an unmeaning term; the epoch of world literature is at hand,and everyone must strive to hasten its approach” (132–3).

This was not Goethe’s first reference to Weltliteratur, as he hadbeen thinking about the topic for some time and had mentioned itpreviously in letters and his diary. But this has become the mostrenowned utterance.9 Goethe believed that a universal worldliterature was in the process of formation in which Germans wouldplay a vital role. Since he never developed this concept systemati-cally, it is appropriate to ask what he meant by Weltliteratur.

It seems that he understood by it less a collection of masterpiecesthan a state of mind and, more generally, a course of literary trafficand a vehicle for inter-cultural understanding. It was this idea ofprocess, Fritz Strich argues, rather than texts containing “universalchangeless content,” that Goethe had in mind (6, 14). Since worldliterature was for Goethe a means of intellectual intercourse be-tween peoples, anything that expressed the relationship of nationto nation belonged to this category. World literature, Goethe ex-plained to Eckermann, enabled people to correct each other’s errorsby learning from the perspective of others. Thomas Carlyle (hisdisciple in England), he explained, had understood Schiller betterthan the Germans, while “we can judge Shakespeare and Byron,and know how to evaluate their merits perhaps better than theEnglish themselves” (175).10 In this practice of reciprocity lay theprogress of humanity. For world literature, he argued a year later,entailed not just reading but building a universal society; it was a“matter of living men of letters getting to know each other and,through their own inclination and similarity of tastes, finding amotive for corporate action” (qtd. in Strich 11).

This need for “corporate action” was made inevitable by his tur-bulent times. While Goethe acknowledged that literary exchangehad existed since the dawn of literacy and that a form of universal-ity was first achieved by the Greeks, he saw his own age as exem-plifying and requiring ecumenical thinking. The Napoleonic Warsdemonstrated to him the necessity for better communication amongpeoples. Looking at the horrors of these wars, Goethe, like criticstoday flinching at ethnic cleansing, conceived of world literaturewith a hope for greater understanding. Yet these wars, launched inthe name of universalism, had paradoxically the opposite effect,namely the accelerated formation of nation-states by people whoresented the imposition upon them of French Enlightenmentvalues.11 It could also be argued that Goethe’s call for an expandedecumenism was his attempt to counter the spread of French culturethat had come to dominate court societies in eighteenth-centuryEurope. Reciprocity would mean that the dominant nations wouldhave to recognize the achievements of minor ones; in this case, thexxxxxxxxxxxx

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French would have to acknowledge the cultural contributions ofGermans, as they were coming to do, especially after the two booksby Madame de Staël.12

Goethe saw in the literary developments of his time the creationof an ecumenism: the rise of German philosophy, the transmissionof literary journals, the pan-European success of novels such asSamuel Richardson’s Clarissa and Pamela, not least his own TheSuffering of Young Werther and the overall spread of his fame.13 Tobe sure, Goethe himself exemplified the virtues of world literaturein his prodigious reading, his sincere interest in the literaturesbeyond Europe’s frontiers, his extensive writings on various topics,his promotion of translation, and his collaboration with Europeanwriters and scholars.

Beyond these aesthetic concerns, Goethe saw in his epoch whatwe today would call globalization—the rapidity of communicationmade possible by the “age of speed,” “rotation,” the steam engine,and the postal system (Strich 31, 40). In this sense, Goethe pre-figured our thinking about globalization. For global studies todayexpand on Goethe’s sense of intellectual intercourse and politicalcoexistence by looking into economic transnationalism and move-ments of people. These global developments persuaded Goethe thata world literature was crystallizing around him, a process that forhim represented both the literary manifestation of globalization andan instrument toward the latter’s further consolidation. The start-ing point for world literature, however, was national literature,though not nationalism. Goethe loved the former while fearing thelatter (Guillén 41). World literature expressed, for him, the diver-sity of literary production and enhanced understanding amongnations. It was a way, paradoxically, of preserving the variousliteratures. In this, of course, his concept was shaped by JohannGottfried Herder’s idea that the globe was composed by unique andincommensurable cultures.

Despite its growing influence, the concept of world literatureremained theoretically vague even at its nascent stage. TheodorMundt, a German writer, griped about this ambiguity as early as1838 during his travels in England. He complained of being soaccosted about world literature that he tried to avoid the topicentirely; yet this idea pursued him relentlessly in every inn “like aMarlborough-tune” (Strich 281). All poor Mundt could do was pleadfor a greater “clarity” that has eluded the concept from the be-ginning.

Writers like Mundt attested to the quick spread of Goethe’s coin-age throughout Europe. It even worked its way into the CommunistManifesto, which was published in 1848.14 Its haziness, however,has not dissipated with time. On the whole, world literature hasmeant for people the awareness of literatures beyond their own, anxxxxxxxxxxxx

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openness to work composed in other languages, the appreciation ofcultural difference, the need to see the interconnection betweenliterary traditions, the necessity to promote translation. In time,however, it lost the political and social signification Goetheattributed to it and came to mean what he had always avoided: acollection of great works.

This meaning was encouraged in the United States, where, afterWorld War II, anthologies of and courses on world literature forundergraduates proliferated. Although informed by the Goetheanideal of global awareness and transnational cooperation, theseanthologies and classes necessitated the creation of reading lists.The teaching of world literature in American universities, SarahLawall argues, was based on the Great Books model that hademerged in the 1920s. It promised students a greater understandingof the world. Such courses were gradually abandoned in the 1960sas a consequence of the critique of the canon and the attack onliterature in general. Some of these Great Books were incorporatedin interdisciplinary or general humanities classes in which, sig-nificantly, literature no longer played the leading role (Lawall 8–9).This should serve as a word of caution to schemes, most recentlyproposed by Spivak, to fuse Comparative Literature with Area Stu-dies. When seated at the same table with the social and naturalsciences, literature occupies the least desirable seat.15

Yet world literature is making a comeback among critics today asa result of interest in globalization, trepidations over nationalism, theprivileging of the diasporic and transnational, disenchantment withComparative Literature, and the continued compartmentalizationof literary study in departments of national literature.16 Theimpossibility of a structuralist poetics, the fragmentation of Theoryinto theories,17 and the challenges posed by multiculturalism andpostcolonialism prompt critics to return to the ecumenical categoryof world literature. The term allows them to propose the relevanceof literature in our global age, unencumbered by the ideologicalrobes of Comparative Literature. World literature makes a betterfit with our Zeitgeist.

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The idea of world literature has recently received an enthusiasticendorsement from David Damrosch in What Is World Literature?While Damrosch introduces an essentially Goethean conception ofworld literature, he gives it the nuance demanded by our more com-plex global environment. Recognizing the term’s elusiveness, Dam-rosch defines world literature as encompassing “all literary worksthat circulate beyond their culture of origin, either in translation orin their original languages” (4). Like Goethe, he refuses to limitxxxxxxxxxxxx

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world literature to a collection of masterpieces, preferring to see itinstead as “a mode of circulation and of reading, a mode that is asapplicable to individual works as to bodies of material, available forreading established classics and new discoveries alike” (5).18

Damrosch wishes to explore what happens to a work once itleaves its point of origin. This is important because, as he explains,literary texts “take on a new life as they move into the world atlarge” (24). His aim is to understand the process by which theworks become reframed through their translation into both otherlanguages and other societies. Specifically, he wants to clarify waysin which these works can be read as they move out of their nationalhome (5).

Damrosch’s range is as breathtaking as his polyglossia. A pas-sionate reader of world literature, in translation or in the original,he also goes back in time. Unlike many practitioners of globalstudies who do not think it necessary to look what came beforeArjun Appadurai or Homi Bhabha, Damrosch actually believes inhistory. His mode of travel is as much a time capsule as a jet plane.Thus it is refreshing to begin a book on world literature with theEpic of Gilgamesh, the Sumerian poem composed on cuneiform tab-lets discovered by British archaeologists in 1853. Damrosch alsoreads ancient Egyptian love lyrics; Aztec poetry; poems by thethirteenth-century mystic Mechthild von Magdeburg; prose byFranz Kafka, P.G. Wodehouse, and Rigoberta Menchú; and, finally,the Dictionary of the Khazars by the Serb author Milorad Pavic. Itis a generous mix.

By considering works from varied times and places, Damroschcomplicates Goethe’s notion of Weltliteratur. For he intends to arguethat texts of world literature “are always particularly liable to beassimilated to the immediate interests and agendas of those whoedit, translate, and interpret them” (25). Goethe’s notion was highlyidealized, a marketplace of literary exchange conducted by gentryor gentlemen who, on the whole, believed that women’s literaturewas incapable of escaping its domesticity to enter the world. Al-though a vision of intercultural awareness motivates his project,Damrosch knows too well that the worlds in world literature arequite often worlds in collision (14). In other words, he wants tohighlight the iniquitous relationship between the various literarytraditions, namely, the fact that they do not all exert the sameinfluence and that some have infinitely more authority than others.We have learned too much since Goethe’s congenial conversationswith Eckermann about the formation of literary canons, the insti-tutionalization of national literatures, the evaluation of texts, andthe apportionment of status to believe in a world of refined readingcommunities. Although Goethe emphasized a highly mobile modelof world literature, he did not raise questions about the rules ofxxxxxxxxxxxx

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traffic and their enforcement, the necessity of travel documents, andthe differentiating means of movement available to differentnational traditions.

The world literary system is, as Franco Moretti puts it, “pro-foundly unequal” (“Conjectures” 56). That is to say, there has neverbeen any symmetry in global literary relations. There are broadexpansive literatures supported by vast linguistic networks andpromoted by the wealth and power of strong states and economies.These literatures may be relatively young, as in the case of theUnited States, or have a centuries-long tradition, as in the case ofFrance. On the other hand, other literatures may be equally old,such as the Greek, but written in small, not frequently heardlanguages. Some, such as Palestinian literature, may have emergedas a national institution in the last half of the twentieth century.They do not all have the same access to the global literary market.

The capacity of English and French literatures to have an impacton literary developments elsewhere is extraordinary, backed up bythe force of their respective languages, the prestige of theirtraditions, and the muscle of their culture industries. Englishwriting makes its presence felt around the world in a way un-imaginable for most national literatures. It has been promoted bythe hegemonic positions of Great Britain and the United States,which have served for two centuries as flag-bearers of English. Inany particular year translations of literary works from English into,say, Bulgarian, Dutch, or Arabic vastly outnumber Bulgarian,Dutch, or Arabic works translated into English. In fact, translationcurrently comprises about 2–4% of the annual output for Britishand American publishers.19 This contrasts with 14% in Hungary,15% in Germany, and 25% in Italy. In Brazil, an astonishing 60%of new titles consist of translations, 75% English. Since World WarII English has been the most translated tongue worldwide (Venuti88, 160).20 The paeans to globalization drown out a fainter butsobering moan—the major literary networks seek out the smallersystems less than the other way around.

This has always been the case. In the period between 1750 and1850, as Moretti shows, most European countries imported a largeportion of their novels from Britain and France, which, by contrast,translated few works of fiction from other languages. The majorityof novels read by Europeans at the time were actually translations.This imbalance undercuts the claim made by Marx and Engels inthe Communist Manifesto that the various national literatures wereyielding a world literature. In truth, according to Moretti, what tookplace was a “planetary reproduction of a couple of national litera-tures” (Atlas 151, 187).

Moretti’s contention is borne out by the Greek case. Greek schol-ars and poets who traveled to Europe in the eighteenth century andxxxxxxxxxxxx

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read the works of British, French, and German authors discoveredhow “backwards” Greek society was. They encouraged the transla-tion of these works into Greek even as they advocated the creationof a Greek national literature. That Byron and Goethe took an in-terest in Greek folk poetry at that time, or that Claude Fauriel andWerner von Haxthausen collected and translated examples of thispoetry into French and German, respectively, in the early nine-teenth century, does not balance out the accounting sheet of globalliterary exchange. Greek writers knew then and continue to knownow more of the major European literatures than Europeans knowof Greek writing. Greek literature has been a product of this nego-tiation between local realities and European models (Jusdanis,Belated). The Greek case provides an early example of what hasbecome the rule in the emergence of literatures: rapprochementbetween indigenous traditions and global paradigms.21 F. AbiolaIrele has shown, for instance, that African literature exists “in thecontext of a recognizable corpus of texts and works by Africans,situated in relation to global experience that embraces both theprecolonial and the modern frames of reference” (7).

Damrosch is cognizant of these issues, as he is of the fact thatworld literature is produced in a dialogue between the local andglobal. We require, he contends, new modes of understanding cross-cultural exchange and novel ways to read texts so as to avoid “oldessentialisms” (84). The challenge, for him, is how to conceptualizethe literary text once it enters the global world of literary exchange.In other words, how do we imagine what this world literature lookslike? What metaphor are we going to use to help us understand it?

Clearly, writing after thirty years of theory, Damrosch does notsupport the precepts of the original comparatists, namely that, de-spite differences, the various literatures followed the same aestheticprinciples. He is Herderian in his embrace of the uniqueness of eachculture. But Herder proposed a theory of world history that gavemeaning and dynamism to society. Damrosch cannot offer anythingsimilar. He does not favor the “polysystems” approach developed byItamar Even-Zohar or the “world-systems” theory assembled by Im-manuel Wallerstein. While he refers to Moretti’s systemic methodof charting the spread of the novel throughout Europe, he dislikesMoretti’s lack of attention to the close reading of texts (25–6).Ultimately, Damrosch believes that we do not have to choose be-tween overarching summation and detailed examination. Yet, bynot formulating a theoretical model to navigate through worldliterature, Damrosch effectively abandons his readers to thevagaries of globalization as they search for unrelated texts.

A central problem faced by Comparative Literature, I argued ear-lier, was that it was comparing genetically independent phenomenaor that it lacked concepts and standards to make this comparisonxxxxxxxxxxxx

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meaningful. It tried to overcome this by narrowing the object ofstudy. In Moretti’s case, this narrowing leads to the geography anddissemination of the novel in Europe as the dominant object ofstudy; Erich Auerbach looked at the changing modes of representa-tion in the western tradition; Ernst Robert Curtius investigated theliterature of the Middle Ages. In each example the critic posed aconstant object to which the others were compared or from the per-spective of which they were investigated: the novel, modes ofrepresenting, a historical period. Damrosch builds no lighthousefrom which to look out upon the amplitude of world literature.Without a particular point of view, we are left with a project ofindiscriminate reading.

To the question, Why should any one read this motley assemblyof texts? Damrosch answers that he wants to trace “what is lost andwhat is gained in translation, looking at the intertwined shifts oflanguage, era, region, religion, and literary context that a work canincur as it moves from its point of origin out into a new culturalsphere” (34). This is a splendid goal. But can it really be accom-plished when one has to read texts spanning the globe and threethousand years of human history for which one has to supply muchbackground material? Should the openness of world literature notbe balanced by the narrowing of methodology? These are importantquestions, for Damrosch himself recognizes the dangers of uncriticaleclecticism. Scholars of world literature, he warns, run the risk ofbecoming “ecotourists” (5). Or, to change the metaphor, they are indanger of falling through a thin-ice universalism.

Damrosch’s chapter on the Epic of Gilgamesh comes to mindhere. Fully half of it is devoted to a traditional account of thediscovery and subsequent fate of the cuneiform tablets. About one-third concerns the text itself, during which Damrosch wonders howwe should approach the poem. “What would it now mean,” he ask,“to read the text as a work of world literature” in light of thespecific information we have now about its original society (65, 66)?Damrosch’s concern is really part of a greater question that readershave been asking for centuries, namely, how we should approachantiquity. Classicists, for instance, have grappled with these ques-tions since the founding of their discipline in the nineteenth cen-tury. Instead of reinventing the wheel, we might want to see howthey approach this problem.

Damrosch’s solution states the obvious:22 that we should “try tounderstand the poem’s psychology, and its ‘humanism,’ withoutcollapsing these terms into our modern understanding” and that wehave to “look at the epic’s Sumerian prehistory” (71). I don’t knowthe intended audience of this advice—perhaps presentist culturalcritics preoccupied with current events—but it seems perfectlystandard practice in the analysis of any literary text, let alone onexxxxxxxxxxxx

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from the distant past. We do not get many answers, however, tomore pressing questions: What do we learn about world literatureby looking at the epic? How, in what sense, is it an example ofworld literature? Above all, how does his chapter on Gilgameshdiffer from one he or another specialist might write for a book on,say, ancient Near Eastern literature as opposed to one on worldliterature?

The difficulty lies in the conception of world literature, which, bydefinition, is ambiguous, and in Damrosch’s decision to serve up asalade Macédoine of texts. This recipe is understandable, given hiscosmopolitan ideals. A book that studies world literature should beecumenical in taste and grasp. World literature, Damrosch believes,enriches our lives. “We feel ourselves brought into a dynamic en-gagement with an actual other world ... a world dramatically dis-tant from us in time, space, and culture” (164). But this ecumenismof attitude anchors what may be an inherently impossible project.Having extended the scope of world literature from Akkadian epicsto Aztec incantations, Damrosch poses a negative question—“Whatisn’t world literature?”—to which he provides no adequate response(110). Damrosch opens his concluding chapter by asking again,“And so, what is world literature?” (281). His answer is againmurky. World literature, he writes, “is fully at play once severalforeign works begin to resonate together in our mind” (298). Hestates that he has given us his world literature “while recognizingthat the world now presents us with material so varied as to callinto question any logic of representation, any single framework thateveryone should adopt and in which these particular works wouldall have a central role” (281).

It is not only the variety that may cause readers anxiety but thevast number of texts to be read. This amplitude induces the kind ofawe that Romantic painters sought in their depiction of landscapeor Herman Melville in his attempt to portray the immensity of thesea in Moby Dick. Who can know enough, Damrosch asks, to doworld literature well? For good reason, he cautions that a specterof amateurism hangs over comparative literature today (284).Students of world literature have to address this issue. For all itsfaults, Comparative Literature implied an intellectual activity—areading, interpreting, and systematizing activity conducted from aparticular occidentalist outlook—that constructed an object ofknowledge out of the world’s texts, which it then investigatedthrough a process of close reading. By contrast, at the current stageof its development, world literature simply identifies its rawmaterial—texts drawn from everywhere—without creating a per-spective or offering a methodology.

Can one practice world literature with unconditional ecumenism?And is this ecumenicism, by definition, also a problem for anyxxxxxxxxxxxx

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concept of world literature as a whole? We have to find ways,Damrosch argues, “of assessing and working with texts that nowrange from the earliest Sumerian poetry to the most recent fictionalexperiments of the Tibetan postmodernists” (111). He poses an un-realizable Romantic goal, that is, to express the totality of worldliterary production in one book. After the ontological failures ofFriedrich Hölderlin, Dionysios Solomos, Gustave Flaubert, and Sté-phane Mallarmé to compose the absolute Work, one is suspicious ofsuch projects. So when Damrosch asks, “How can we have it all?”one might respond: Why should we? Why do we need to evaluate inone breath Sumerian epics and Tibetan postmodernism? Whatwould be the point of a study that moves from book to book, age toage, society to society, so indiscriminately? What would be the riskhere? Who is the intended audience? Even though Damrosch limits,for practical purposes, the practice of World Literature—to a “modeof reading that can be experienced intensively with a few works”(299)—it remains, in theory, beyond anybody’s grasp. The issue isnot so much the personal failures or amateurism of critics, real asthese may be, but the theoretical shakiness of the entire project.

Related to this is the presumed novelty of world literature. Forbasic to Damrosch’s understanding of this concept, as with Goethe’s,is that it is a different phenomenon, unprecedented in human his-tory. Although Goethe recognized Greek literature as universal, heproposed that the literature of his age was new. He believed thathis age fostered the reciprocal relations between nations and theexchange of ideas which enabled the rise of world literature (Strich54). In other words, world literature would be inconceivable outsidethe modern process of globalization. Damrosch follows suit. LikeGoethe, he assumes that contemporary globalization is historicallyunique and that it makes possible the creation of world literature.Damrosch provides some fascinating readings; he shows the inter-relationships of texts; he demonstrates the inherently syncreticnature of all literary creation. But he has not shown that what isoccurring today is really different from what has always takenplace. If world literature is nothing other than the attitude of “adetached engagement with a world beyond our own” (297), thenthere has always been world literature.

The view of globalization as a modern phenomenon is a conceitof our times.23 The rise of Comparative Literature in the late nine-teenth century, as I noted earlier, was a manifestation of trans-national thinking. Works of literature themselves attempted tocome to grips with and to represent this thinking. For instance, theidea of a shrinking world, a central tenet of current globalizationtheory, motivates the plot in Jules Verne’s Around the World inEighty Days, which was published in 1872. “The world is gettingsmaller,” asserts a gentleman in Phileas Fogg’s private club, “sincexxxxxxxxxxxx

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a man can now go around it ten times more quickly than a hundredyears ago” (21). To be sure, it is the rapid steamers plowing theglobe and the railway lines connecting distant cities that enable Mr.Fogg to undertake the audacious journey of traversing the globe ineighty days, along with his loyal servant Passepartout, whose veryname suggests border crossing. In the last half of the nineteenthcentury, John Keane writes, “the planet began to feel more tightlyknitted together by the threads of people, capital, commodities, andideas in motion” (45).

Certain aspects of globalization are, of course, modern, such asthe new techniques of communication and transportation, capital-ism, the United Nations. Ideas, goods, and people travel around theworld with a velocity unimaginable before. But the compression oftime and space possible today should not blind us to the existenceof universal structures and phenomena before the nineteenth cen-tury, or even before modernity. One can point to the multiethnicempires of antiquity, the transportation system of the Roman Em-pire, the silk route, global markets, and universal religions. Trade,war, and disease have always brought people together and rippedthem apart. The forces pushing today for more integration, and thedialectical reaction to them, are a continuation, albeit at greaterspeed, of ancient developments.

The same can be said of literature. The most celebrated exampleof world literature in antiquity is that of the Greco-Roman period.Less obvious, but more relevant to Damrosch’s perspective, is theextraordinary exchange that took place between Greek and Persiancultures with respect to romances. As Dick Davis has shown in Pan-thea’s Children: Hellenistic Novels and Medieval Persian Romances,the thematic overlap between Greek and Persian romances demon-strates a reciprocal relationship rather than one of simple influenceexerted by Greece on Persia. The period in which the Greek novelswere written, c. 100 BCE to c. 300 CE, corresponds to the ParthianEmpire in Iran, the most hybrid and syncretic moment in Iranianhistory. The exchange taking place between the two literatures isconsistent with Goethe’s and Damrosch’s descriptions of world lite-rature. One can point to many parallel examples from other periodsand societies.

Of course, the situation today differs as to the speed with whichpeople can gain information from all possible sources and theheightened sense of simultaneity this creates. Readers today, forinstance, may read book reviews published in a Somalian news-paper on the Web; they may receive a book of Japanese poetry fromJapan within a week through the mail; they may listen to Iranianverse on the radio. That we can get an instant snapshot of currentliterary production, however, should not delude us into thinkingthat our age is exceptional. Can we discount the existence of axxxxxxxxxxxx

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common literary market for the novel in the nineteenth century,Enlightenment universalism, Renaissance poetics, Greek, Latin, orFrench as global literary languages of their time, the internationalsuccess of Don Quixote, medieval scholasticism, the classicalheritage, the manuscript tradition, or the King James Bible? Arethese not examples of world literature in the manner described byDamrosch, that is, writing that circulates in the original or intranslation beyond its point of origin, works that were received intothe space of a foreign culture, texts that were refracted in their newcontexts (281)? If this is the case, then this broader historicalunderstanding should be incorporated in the very theoreticalapparatus of world literature.

Critics point to the self-consciousness of contemporary works ofworld literature; in other words, to novels that either are conscious-ly prepared for the global market or are attentive to and thematizethis market. Pavic’s Dictionary of the Khazars, for instance, iscertainly new in this self-awareness. “Pavic’s book is one of agrowing number of recent novels that take the writing and circula-tion of world literature as an explicit theme” (Damrosch, What 261).Such a novel, like postmodern metafiction or the self-referentialwords of modernism, is an artifact unique to its age. To be sure,today’s writers understand global literary fashions, the intricaciesof the transnational book trade, and the current obsession withexoticism in the West. They may write with these in mind. More tothe point, they often treat as subject the globalized world of jettravel, satellite TV, and American popular culture.

Emblematic of such novels is The God of Small Things by the In-dian author Arundhati Roy. Written in English, the language of ourglobalization, it is planetary in every possible sense–content,marketing, and sales. Promoted by a hype that reduced the usualmeaning of this word to an understatement, it became an overnightsuccess, catapulting its first-time author to galactic stardom. Thatit was in English guaranteed access to a huge audience without theneed of translation. To be sure, this language constitutes part of thenovel’s globalizing trait. It is not an accident that almost allexamples of the new wave of Indian writing splashing on the shoreare composed in English rather than in any of India’s other literarylanguages. This English-only rule of success points to the limits ofglobalization and to the reason why world literature has to rethinkits dogmatic position on language.

It also exemplifies what Graham Huggan calls the “postcolonialexotic,” the fashionable and facile promotion of cultural otherness(201). Roy’s novel thinks about itself globally by making Indian lifeaccessible to a Western audience. This is made possible by the char-acters themselves, who either have lived in upstate New York andLondon, as Rahel has done, or readily consume Western productsxxxxxxxxxxxx

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and culture. In a memorable scene, the grandmother, uncle, andtwins go to see The Sound of Music in 1969. Three decades later thegrandmother can watch Donahue, MTV, Clinton, and Oprah on hersatellite television. The novel thus celebrates these border-crossing,identity-twisting characters and features of globalization. At thesame time, it makes the exotic familiar to readers in the West. Howstrange can these people be if they watch MTV? While we are skep-tical today of Goethe’s search for a universal humanity through lit-erary mobility, should we not question how the industry of worldliterature promotes an effortlessly accessible Otherness?

The media-driven process that converted the yet unproven authorinto a Weltstar cannot be separated from the novel’s plot, language,and characterization. Riding a “wave of heady journalistic clichés,The God of Small Things,” Huggan writes, “duly emerged as thelatest (post-) Orientalist blockbuster—the latest Westernized novelof the East” (76). Important here, he continues, is how the novelanticipated and participated in the global “process of its own com-mercial promotion.” The novel reveals the connection, so essentialto its triumph, between the representations of the Other in theWest and the marketing of Indian fiction in English.

Although few writers have their ships propelled by the star-making winds of the global culture industry, many do write withthis industry in mind. The Turkish author Orhan Pamuk comes tomind. Why, Güneli Gün asks, is he touted as the new Turkish lite-rary prodigy, when there are other Turkish writers who are as“good or better?” One reason is that he translates well into English.Another, equally important, is that he has a “finger on the pulse ofworld literature” (59). Pamuk has borrowed “the attitudes andstrategies of Third World authors writing for the consumption ofthe First World” (62). He has incorporated two characteristics thatThird World writing must have to succeed in the West: clevernessand fantasy (63). Interestingly, these two traits are outside theconcerns of mainstream realist tradition of Turkish literature,specifically the so-called Village Novel. Although they deal withexotic themes, these novels are not sufficiently international fortranslation into Western languages. In other words, their depictionof peasant life through traditional, transparent prose is not whatinternational readers want today.

Knowing the significance of translation for the acquisition of awider readership, many authors write with the intention of promot-ing a successful translation of their novels. These novelists, eventhose writing in broadly extended languages such as Arabic, under-stand that English or French translation gains them prestige athome and abroad and the potential of reaching a huge audience inboth. Jenine Abboshi Dallal points to a number of Arabic-languagenovels in which authors leave unexplained references to Westernxxxxxxxxxxxx

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culture even as they comment on Arab customs and practices thatwould be familiar to local readers. This “writing for translation”clearly responds to the pressures and promises of the Westernmarketplace (8). These authors take an active role in the possibletranslation of their work by writing for a world rather than a localaudience.24

To a certain extent this is not entirely new. Authors, particularlythose writing in lesser-known languages, have always had to workaccording to aesthetic, political, moral, and economic rules andregulations set by metropolitan centers. Indeed, these “minor”literatures have to confront the skyscraper supremacy of dominantliteratures. The career of the Greek writer Nikos Kazantzakis(1883–1957) provides a good example of how such an author facesthis reality. A world author in the Goethean sense, he was fluentin many European languages; read voraciously; translated Euro-pean literature into Greek; traveled widely; took an interest in non-Western societies; wrote lyric poetry, an epic, novels, dramas,criticism, and travelogues; and lived most of his life outside ofGreece. It is significant that he was more successful abroad than athome, where his native Crete and its dialect seemed as exotic tosome metropolitan Greeks as Greek literature looked to readers inParis and New York. Kazantzakis clearly wrote for a global audi-ence, consciously striving for universal themes even when hismaterial was about Greece. Like today’s postcolonial authors, do-mesticating the differences of their homelands for a global audience,he attempted to make Greece, still an exotic place to most West-erners in the first half of the twentieth century, familiar to them.

His celebrated 1946 novel Zorba the Greek is a good illustrationof this strategy. Set on Crete around the 1920s, it chronicles a yearin the life of Alexis Zorbas, a man representing the chthonic forceof history, and of the narrator, a Western-educated liberal who hascome to the island to discover himself and conduct a socialistexperiment. The narrator, who is significantly transformed into anEnglishman in the hugely popular film by Michael Cacoyannis, actsas our interpreter, making sense of the primordial Zorba and thewild, unreformable peasants. He supplies the language and logic ofthe Enlightenment with which we can understand this alien world.The novel depicts as many images of Otherness as any of today’s“non-Western” texts: ethnic cleansing in the Balkan Wars of 1912–1913, a mysterious widow clad in black, orgiastic dancing on thebeach, the priapic Zorba, lecherous monks, vendetta murder, thevillagers’ xenophobia. Making sense of this is the cool, self-con-trolled commentary of the narrator, as shocked by what he sees aswe are.

What differentiates the situation then from that of today is thetransnational culture industry that markets fictional exoticism andxxxxxxxxxxxx

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makes authors into overnight celebrities on the basis of a singlebook. Anyone wishing to look back before the frenzy of our globalswirl knows that we have seen all this before. Writers from mar-ginal societies have always had to negotiate between the local andthe universal, to come to terms with the lingua franca of the time,to seek out translation, and to represent their indigenous societiesin a language and through metaphors graspable by Western read-ers. Kazantzakis knew he had to work with the strange–familiardichotomy representing Greece: a European country but on theborders between East and West; a Christian society, yet neitherCatholic nor Protestant; a nation ruled by the Ottoman Empirerather than by the Austro-Hungarian Empire. That his writing doesnot inspire international readers as it once did shows, among otherthings, that the points of reference for exoticism, like tourism, shiftconstantly. No longer charmed by the magic of the Greek islands,people look for a cheaper holiday in Turkey, or go further to Bali orNepal, taking their literary tastes with them. Thus, when Dam-rosch (unintentionally echoing the words of Phileas Fogg) claimsthat “the world is looking much wider today than it did twenty-fiveyears ago” (143), he is only partly right. The canon of worldliterature is indeed opening up to new texts, but it is at the sametime dropping old ones. Halldór Laxness’s portrayal in IndependentPeople of the struggle by sheep farmers in the early twentiethcentury to gain financial and personal autonomy in the forbiddingIcelandic countryside may no longer excite Western readers. By thesame token, who is interested today in Knut Hamsun’s depiction ofNorwegian folkways? Readers will have to decide for themselveswhether the canon is richer for having jettisoned these authorswhile acquiring new ones from farther afield.

Nations and their literatures become relevant to internationalreaders because they seem to correspond to these readers’ currentpassions, fears, or curiosities. The Greek case again demonstratesthis very well. Europeans took an interest in modern Greece in theeighteenth century partly as a result of the discourse of Hellenism.They began to think about the modern inhabitants of Greece be-cause of their real and alleged connection to the past. Their con-cern, in other words, was incidental to the antiquarian preoccupa-tion of the time.

During the 1821 Greek Revolution against the Ottoman Empire,liberals all over Europe and America enthusiastically supported theGreek uprisings, which they saw as a struggle between West andEast, democracy and empire, Christianity and Islam. The philhel-lenism roused by the Greek effort for independence was a globalphenomenon not to be seen again until the Spanish Civil War. Itled many to take an interest in Greek literature itself. Goethe, forinstance, encouraged his fellow German Werner von Haxthausen toxxxxxxxxxxxx

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translate and publish his collection of Greek folk poetry. Goethehimself translated six folk poems in his Kunst und Altertum in1823. He corresponded on the topic of Greek literature with schol-ars such as Rizos Neroulos and K.Th. Kind (Strich 314). WhileGoethe’s interests were ecumenical, they were also motivated byideological factors like philhellenism.25

More recently, outsiders turned their attention to Greece duringthe Greek junta’s rule of 1967–1973, horrified at the widespread useof censorship, torture, and mass incarceration in “the birthplace ofdemocracy.” Specifically, they saw in Greek poetry part of the fightagainst dictatorship. With the eventual return of democracy in the1970s, readers found in other countries material for their politicalanxieties and aesthetic preoccupations. Understandably, those inte-rested in the struggle for human rights and the creation of liberalcivil societies, for instance, now look to Eastern Europe or SouthAmerica. Critics concerned with the struggle for freedom will morelikely read Rigoberta Menchú, Isabel Allende, or J.M. Coetzee thansuch Greek authors as Alki Zei, Maro Douka, or Aris Alexandrou.The Greek authors are talented, practice postmodern writing, andare widely read in Greece, but they will never acquire an interna-tional audience, for reasons outside their control. It is perhaps nota coincidence that the Nobel Prizes awarded to Greek authors,George Seferis in 1963 and Odysseas Elytis in 1979, were given atthis time of heightened interest in Greek things. The prize sought,as is often true, to bring wider attention to authors from marginaltraditions whose writings correspond with broader European con-cerns, in this case modernist and postmodernist aesthetics and de-mocratization.

World literature, Damrosch claims, is as much about the metro-politan host culture’s values and needs as it is about the work’ssource culture. The receiving society may use the foreign work as amodel for emulation, a negative case to be avoided, or an image ofOtherness (282). What is bought, what is hailed as universal, whatis read outside its borders, has to do with rules and issues beyondthe specific work. This is particularly true of translation. A text istranslated, as Lawrence Venuti argues, always according to thevalues of the target language. The selection of foreign texts, then,can establish peculiar canons of foreign literature in each country.Venuti points to the “boom, usually, not boon” of South Americannovels in the 1960s and 1970s. This explosion represented less asudden increase in the quantity and quality of South American lite-rary activity than an abrupt jump in translation into English ofSouth American novels. It was a North American creation, sup-ported by critics, scholars, and writers who were interested in thefantastic experimentalism of South American novels (169).

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Today the criteria for determining whether or not a text is worldliterature have to do with its place of origin, which increasingly islocated in Europe’s former colonies. Emily Apter argues as muchwhen she says that the territorial skirmishes within the field ofComparative Literature “have to do with the way in which postcolo-nial theory has ... usurped the disciplinary space that Europeanliterature and criticism had reserved for themselves” (86). Worldliterature is embracing those literatures that the Eurocentrism ofComparative Literature ignored.

There is a great danger, however, that world literature willpresent a restricted, and ultimately inadequate, view of the world,much as Comparative Literature did. Whereas its precursor limiteditself in theory and practice to Western European traditions, worldliterature may come to signify, if it does not already, the literaturesof North America, of Western Europe, and of its colonies. Other lite-rary traditions—say, Armenian, Bulgarian, modern Greek, Hebrew,and Icelandic—that do not fit into either the cosmopolitan or thepostcolonial template will not be part of the draft. Even Damrosch,despite his very capacious conception of world literature, ends upunderwriting this bipolar understanding of the term. He does, ofcourse, devote chapter 9 to Pavic’s Dictionary of the Khazars.26 Buthe analyzes this “poisoned book” as a “cautionary tale” of whathappens to world literature when critics disregard the social contextof the novel, in this case the extreme nationalism of the author.Moreover, since this is the only text he is demonstrably critical ofin his book, Damrosch unwittingly reinforces the stereotype of theBalkans as a place of ethnic hatred and murderous nationalismthat is anathema to the liberal cosmopolitanism of world literature.

Such a conception of world literature will end up repeating theblinkered transnationalism of Comparative Literature by erasingfrom view a large part of the planet that does not fit the Western/Third World and colonial/postcolonial binary oppositions. Ultimate-ly, this postcolonial schema cannot comprehend and deal with thecomplexity of today’s globalized world with its multiple centers. Wehave only begun to realize that the idea of empire in the post-1989but also post–Gulf War II world will require some rethinking.

An exclusive focus on empire not only misses many aspects ofliterary production but is also chronocentric, portraying today’swriting as exceptional. Since it relies so heavily on the postcolonialmoment, world literature grants this experience illustrative but, ul-timately, ahistorical significance. Much has been said, for instance,about the syncretism of contemporaneous novels such as ZadieSmith’s White Teeth. These novels certainly depict the cultural mix-ing brought about by empire and capitalism. But neither empire norpolyethnicity is unique to the last two centuries. An examination ofxxxxxxxxxxxx

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the empires of antiquity, for instance, shows that they spawnedcomparable fiction. I refer again to the ancient Greek romances,particularly the novel Aethiopica, by Heliodorus, about whom weknow nothing other than his name and his place of birth, Phoenicia,then a province of the Roman Empire.27 Although set in theclassical period of the fifth century BCE, it was written sometimein the third century CE in Greek, still the lingua franca of theEastern Mediterranean. A provincial author such as Heliodorus hadto write in Greek if he wanted access to the readers of the Empire.The situation today is not so different.

The romance follows the tribulations of Theogenes and Charicleiaas they evade pirates, robbers, and kidnappers, escape torture andimprisonment, and persevere through ritual trials while maintain-ing their love and chastity. We are truly in the ethnic, racial, andreligious cauldron of the late Roman Empire, which blended peopleas never before. For unlike the writings of the classical period, inwhich the Greek perspective was privileged and the dominant con-ceptual opposition was between Greeks and Barbarians, here theview is kaleidoscopic. This is a global novel of late antiquity,inhabited by Greeks, Egyptians, Phoenicians, Persians, and Ethio-pians, all now citizens of the Roman Empire after Caracalla ex-tended citizenship in 212. The novel begins in Egypt, returns toGreece in a flashback, but ends in Ethiopia, the birthplace of theprotagonist, Charicleia, where she discovers that her true parents,the king and queen of Ethiopia, are black. She also learns thesource of her own whiteness. Her mother, horrified that, havinggiven birth to a white child, she would be accused of adultery,decided to expose her daughter on the mountain, hoping that thechild would be rescued by a passerby, as indeed she was.28

The Aethiopica is every bit an example of world literature, notonly in the course of its transmission to us through time and spacebut also in the depiction of its contemporaneous global society. Thisand other similar works show that world literature, rather thanbeing a product of the last few centuries, has always been in exis-tence, though not in its modern self-conscious manifestation. If thisis the case, world literature may turn out to be an overly roomycategory, trying to be all things to all people. How useful can a termbe that brings together Aethiopica and Midnight’s Children, Azteclyric and Serbo-Croatian epic, slave narratives and avant-gardefiction?

This is an important question for the future of world literaturein light of the failures of Comparative Literature. I argued earlierthat theoretical diffuseness and restricted cosmopolitanism were thetwo flaws of that discipline that contributed to its current situation.World literature has inherited these weak spots. It attempts to ac-complish too much without an adequate theoretical infrastructure.xxxxxxxxxxxx

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With some justification, Roland Greene writes that world literatureis a name without a concept (1244). Moreover, it has yet to developmethodologies for reading the amplitude of texts it identifies as itsraw material.

In the absence of theoretical infrastructure and requisite method-ologies, world literature runs the risk of turning into anothercelebration of global difference, much like the idols of currentacademe—multiculturalism, hybridity, and diaspora. It could be-come simply an alternate way of marketing exoticism, of makingreaders feel good about their cosmopolitanism just as visitors toAmerican ethnic festivals are proud of their openness. Rather thana valuable tool for comprehending global literary relations and forencouraging readers to look beyond their literary homes, it could beconverted into another American universalism, a globalism lite tobe forced on the world. In short, there is a danger that world lite-rature may develop into the planetary extension of liberal multicul-turalism, disseminating around the globe the American experienceof cultural difference.

This is why the issue of language is so significant. For all itsimperfections, Comparative Literature was adamant in asking stu-dents and teachers alike to acquire languages in order to under-stand the literatures and the people in question. The emergent fieldof world literature is largely silent on language. For entirelypractical reasons, it promotes translation. But does this mean thatworld literature will speak only English, just as globalization does?Would a text be considered world literature only if it is translatedinto English? Will this not foster the impression that world lite-rature constitutes one world and one language? If this is the case,we should at least be open to the skepticism that this English-onlywill provoke in other parts of the world.29

With the decline of Comparative Literature and the conversionof literature departments into departments of cultural studies,which entity in the university will be left justify the study oflanguage? This is crucial, since the Department of English is emerg-ing as an empire, even if, like the American empire, it is in denial.Not only does it incorporate new approaches like Queer Studies andEcocriticism, it also expands its borders to include the writings ofall the former British colonies, from India to Canada. While boththese developments are welcome, complicating the definition of Eng-lish, the sheer growth of the discipline, in conjunction with CulturalStudies, supports a take-no-prisoners monolingualism. Both dis-ciplines pose specific dangers. While Cultural Studies underminesthe idea of literature, English undercuts the necessity of learning an-other language. The extension of English into postcolonial studies,for instance, advances the idea that it is the heir of ComparativeLiterature.30 While Comparative Literature may be dead elsewhere,xxxxxxxxxxxx

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English critics may argue, it is alive in the English Department.These developments further solidify the perception promulgated bymulticulturalism that diversity is a matter of culture (race, ethni-city, gender, and sexual orientation) rather than also of language.There is a great risk that world literature will ask students not todiscover a complex, interconnected world but rather to draft for theworld an American, Anglo-Saxon, English-language template.

This would be an unhappy outcome. World literature has set it-self noble goals. In order for it to live up to its ideals, it has toaddress four conceptual or ideological blind spots: it lacks methodo-logical focus, trying to be all things to all people; its postcolonialorientation does not do justice to the complexity of today’s trans-national ecumene; it presents an American version of globalism; itunwittingly fosters monoglossia. Practitioners of world literaturewould do well to reconsider both the failures and the successes ofComparative Literature in this regard. Otherwise world literatureruns the risk of becoming yet another postmodern catchphrase.

Notes

1. I would like to thank Julian Anderson, Nina Berman, Bruce Heiden, Vassilis Lambropoulos,Khachig Tölölyan, and Jim Zafris for their helpful comments.

2. There is no need to provide a history of the discipline. Claudio Guillén’s The Challenge ofComparative Literature is the most up-to-date and comprehensive. The comparative method, asHutcheson Macaulay Posnett noted in 1886 in the first book-length study of comparativeliterature, is older than Comparative Literature (73). See also Texte (109).

3. On the internationalism of Comparative Literature see Remak; Wellek, Concepts; Aldridge,Comparative; and Weisstein, Comparative. The three reports on the field commissioned by theAmerican Comparative Literature Association (1965, 1975, 1993) all applauded thiscosmopolitanism (see Bernheimer).

4. Never having been fully realized, the objective of this general poetics was left to structuralism,which aspired in the 1960s to fashion a more exact, quasi-scientific theory of literature. In itsattempt to develop the laws governing literature, structuralism worked with the category ofgeneral literature that Comparative Literature had already invented.

5. The situation began to change in the 1980s. A. Owen Aldridge remarked in his 1986 study ofthe relationships between East and West that Comparative Literature had begun to accept theliterary traditions of Asia and Africa (Reemergence 9).

6. With some justification, Urlich Weisstein spoke in 1984 of a “permanent crisis of comparativeliterature” (“D’où venons nous?” 167).

7. It did not, as I argued earlier. This “failure” is expressed in the title Comparative Literature,which does not convey the real practice of the discipline. A more appropriate designation wouldbe Comparative Study of Literature, as in the German Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft.

8. It is ironic that Wellek, identifying the problem in a lack of definition, recommendedsharpened focus by distinguishing Comparative Literature “from the study of the history of ideas,or religious and political concepts” (Concepts 293).

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9. Fritz Strich has included an appendix to his Goethe and World Literature that contains all thereferences Goethe made on this subject.

10. Goethe’s position here stands in contrast to the multicultural realism of identity politics,which argues, in its most extreme form, that only people within a particular ethnic or racialgroup can understand the utterances of that group.

11. I demonstrate this in greater detail in The Necessary Nation.

12. Madame de Staël, who presided over one of the most influential literary salons of her time(1766–1817), wrote two books, De la littérature (1800) and De 1’Allemagne (1813), thatcontributed significantly to the dissemination of German ideas in France and England.

13. He was fascinated, for instance, by the warm response he received in France, where even Napo-leon read his work. In a conversation with Goethe, the French leader reported having been movedby his reading of Werther in front of the pyramids. He actually read it seven times (Strich 163).

14. “The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerousnational and local literatures, there arises a world literature” (Marx and Engels 8).

15. This sad truth casts a shadow on the entire discussion of Comparative and world literature.It turns out that comparatists are not alone in failing to provide adequate justification for theirprofession. Critics, in general, are at a loss to explain to themselves, their students, and theuniversity the importance of literary study. I discuss this topic at length in “Two Cheers forAesthetic Autonomy.”

16. The departments are themselves being renamed as German or French Studies to signify theiropenness to film, music, and other products of popular culture.

17. This development itself heralded the decline of Comparative Literature, for it was the mosthospitable home to new theories in the 1960s and 1970s. With the expansion of these theoriesto all departments in the humanities, Comparative Literature has lost an important raison d’être(Godzich 23). If we all do theory now, why do we need Comparative Literature?

18. Yet the Longman Anthology of World Literature, for which Damrosch serves as general editor,certainly does encourage the perception of world literature as a compilation of masterpieces. Sodoes the series “Approaches to Teaching World Literature” published by the Modern LanguageAssociation (see http://www.mla.org/publications/bookstore/bookstore_categories/bookstore_cat_teach_lit).

19. In the United States the climate for foreign fiction is particularly hostile, as confirmed by anarticle in the New York Times. A publisher of a small house compares the bleak situation todaywith the enthusiasm for translation fifty years ago: “Now the doors are virtually shut.” Thereasons for this predicament, the author writes, are an absence of staff editors for translation,“the high cost of translation, the local references in many non-American books and the differentapproach to writing that many foreign authors take” (Kinzer).

20. This asymmetry in translation patterns corresponds to the marginality of translation in theUnited States and Great Britain, where it is underappreciated and underpaid.

21. This dialogue with respect to literature is one of many conducted by intellectuals inmodernizing societies. These intellectuals, as I have argued in The Necessary Nation, whoconfront the technological advance, the cultural developments, and military superiority ofpowerful states, recognize the “backwardness” of their societies and propose a program ofmodernization. Their politicization of ethnicity and its transformation into a national culture isone important part of this project.

22. Damrosch’s generalities often force him to do this. When he castigates European critics forenthusiastically embracing Pavic’s Dictionary of the Khazars without paying attention to the localxxxxxxxxxxxx

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context, he concludes that “understanding the cultural subtext of Pavic’s Khazars is importantfor foreign readers, as otherwise we simply miss the point of much of the book” (276). When isthis not true?

23. I argue this in The Necessary Nation (chap. 6). It is nationalism that is historically uniquerather than globalization.

24. Interestingly, the two types of Arabic novels that most often succeed are those dealing withArab women and the Islamic resurgence, two subjects of intense interest to Western audiences.

25. I have examined these arguments in greater detail in Belated Modernity.

26. Pavic’s novel resembles, to the extent that this is possible for a printed book, a hypertext—thefluid, interactive, Web-oriented material made possible by the computer. Published simultaneous-ly in masculine and feminine versions, which are exactly alike except “that one paragraph iscrucially different,” the novel comprises a series of dictionary entries, divided into three sections(Christian, Muslim, and Jewish), all dealing with the history of the Khazars. Since there is nolinear narrative, the reader “can use the book as he sees fit. As with any other lexicon, some willlook up a word or a name.... Whereas others may look at the book as a text meant to be read inits entirety” (Pavic 12).

27. I am grateful to my colleague Victoria Wohl for sharing with me her ideas on this novel.

28. At a loss to explain the birth of a white baby, the Queen ultimately concludes that while “Iconsorted with my husband I was looking at the picture which represented Andromeda just asPerseus had brought her down from the rock, and my offspring unhappily took on the complexionof that body” (94).

29. An interesting study could be conducted on this phenomenon that would pose the followingquestions: How do other societies view global literary relations? Do they have the need foranthologies of and courses on world literature? Is a monolingual world literature a peculiarlyAmerican phenomenon? If so, what does this say about its development during the reassertionof American power all over the globe?

30. The same argument can be made about the emergence of Francophone Studies.

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