The Global Novel: a literature podcast

World Literature: Theories, Methods and Debates

May 15, 2022 Claire Hennessy
The Global Novel: a literature podcast
World Literature: Theories, Methods and Debates
Show Notes Transcript

What is world literature? How do we define its scope and nature? This episode will share a critical lens on the current theories, methods and debates on world literature, which move in and between countries and cultures. By investigating canonical works of leading theorists, we will get a sense of how institution shapes its discourse around the field. In doing so, we will develop aesthetic, ethical and pedagogical reflections towards a more constructive sense of “world literature." 

Reading list (paid links):
Introduction chapters of the following books:
The Princeton Sourcebook in Comparative Literature: From the European Enlightenment to the Global Present. 2009.
David Damrosch,  What is World Literature? 2003.
Emily Apter,  Against World Literature 2013.
Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters. 2004.
Christopher Predergast, Debating World Literature,  2004.

Editors at N+1, "World-lite: What is Global Literature" (free link)

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What is world literature? Thanks for tuning in, I'm Claire Hennessy. Today we’ll talk about the general landscape of World Literature. We will begin by asking what is world literature, how it’s been developed as an independant academic discipline as well as major debates surrounding the field. 

Here are a few simple but interesting questions to begin our inquiry: what does comparative literature study? Does it apply the same approaches as a certain national literature does? Why do we need to compare? and more importantly, How to compare?


 Even though these questions are all to familiar to professors and researchers of literature, the truth is, they are not that easy to answer, as approaches to literature always evolve around the debates that are constanting shifting and developing. One thing we can claim for certain is that due to the institutional nature of Comparative Literature, it did not succeed in explaining itself with vernacular expression.  


According to the trenchant observation by the editors at n+1, a radical literary magazine that Comparative Literature is in fact a manifestation of the eliteness of our higher education, literally driven by what Edward Said observes as a kind of narccicism that attempts to seperate itself from the piecemeal of the globalized and captalized Kirsh. With this critical awareness in mind, today we will also look into major arguments of Edward Said, David Damrosch, and Emily Apter, to name just a few. 


Another interesting question Is whether Global literature is truly Global? We will address this question with Dr. Ben Hutchinson, professor of European literature at University of Kent, as Professor Hutchinson represents scholars who are doing researches on the other side of the globe. 


To begin with, David Damrosch has warned us that Comparative Literature has been much of an American design in the past, one that aligns with its ideology. Does this mean that comparative literature has always been elite, narcissistic and hegemonic? Well, at least the suggested readings for today’s episode manifest an ideal legacy from Marxism and a self-consciousness towards forming its own institutional discourse. This is the brighter side of comparative literature as it has always been keenly aware of the hubris of monolingualism,  by acknowledging English as a potentially hegemonic language in constructing the modern Tower of Babel. This is part of the reason why Translation studies as a sub-discipline have gained much valence in the U.S.


What about the dark, negative side? Well, Both Emily Apter and David Damrosch have retrospective contemplations on world literature in the past and they both develop new visions towards what a world literature should be in the future, as the editors at N+1 captures well of their views: 


[N=1 editor]


What this means is that like the Olympic Games, world literature is being criticized for putting on a utopian gesture, as it is not political enough for daily practices and addressing inequality of race, class and gender. 


This comment also highlights the subtleties in defining world literature. There seems to be a hierachy within terms such as “world literaure,” “global literaure” and “international literature.” For example, Convention dictates that we address a subfield of modernist studies as “international modernism” rather than “global modernism,” because the word international had been much used with the advent of the modernity, when the genre “the novel” occupied a Pan European landscape, and was truly under the influence of Marx’s ideal of the international. So, what is wrong with literatures that are called global literature? Some snobbish academics would laugh at you if you say global novel or global modernism, because for them, global sounds like a piecemeal of the capitalist low-taste kirch. In fact, in post-colonial studies, the name global is often used to address a geopolitical region, as in the term “the global south” referring to the peripheral and less “modernized” regions compared to their colonial north, namely, Europe and North America.   I think that with time, the difference between global literature and world literature will be viewed as a narccicist jibberish.


Let's focus on how David Damrosch defines world of literature in his 2003 monograph, what is literature. Well, Damrosch refers to world literature as, quote, encompassing all literary works that circulate beyond their culture of origin, in their translation or in their original language. (well here he's referring to the fact that people still read Virgil in Latin).

 In its most expansive sense, world literature could include any work that has ever reached beyond its home base that is within a literary system beyond that of its original culture, unquote. Damrosch further highlights a few key characteristics pertaining to World Literature. First, it has to exert in itself a mode of circulation, and in the process of circulation that is mainly achieved through translation, it gains elevated and multifocal ways of interpretation, to use Damrosch expression, quote, in which a certain work of world literature can be best read, unquote. And this is why translation studies in the US has gained so much valence, as translation theory itself not only examines linguistic communications, when a certain work crosses its border, it also reflects on the philosophy of meaning and representation. The Algerian born French philosopher Jaque Derrida calls  translation as the act of literature, refering to the fact that meanings and interpretations suddenly begin to take on an elevated level through and by translation.  Derrida illustrates this idea through his famous essay on translation, called” What is a relevant translation”. There is a fascinating play with the pun “relevant”, because it is also a French word, but with quite diffferent meanings. What Derrida is doing here is to play with more than one meaning of the word “relevant” in order to come up with more than one realization. On the one hand, as the English word suggests, a relevant translation aims at achieving the most equivalent or relevant meaning expressed in the original. An ideally relevant translation does not emphasize on a verbatim translation, neither does it point at a loose translation. But the secret of achieving a true “relevancy” here lies in understanding a word in its polesemic components. While Some langauges by nature is polysemic, especially French, it is also true that when comparing with another language, meanings multiply and understandings deepen. For example, In French, Relevant is a gerund, signifying a state of being, which should be translated into either seasoning with ingredience, or elevating into a higher level, a concept that is certainly derivative of Hegel’s  “sublation”. It is in this playful and creative fasion, that  Derrida argues for an elevated version of the original. Through the process of comparing with more than one language, literature and culture, meanings begin to take on new form, just as the meaning of “lifting up” and “seasoning with ingredients” occupy the center of Derrida's vision of what an ideal translation should be. For more information please read Derrrida’s essay “What is a relevant translation” and you won’t regret it.


The second nature of world literature, according to Damrosch, is that the working question has to be a masterpiece. So what is a masterpiece and what makes a masterpiece different from a classics? As Damrosch writes on page 15, of what is world  literature, “world literature has often been seen in one or more of the three ways as an established  body of classics, as an evolving canon of masterpieces, or as multiple windows on the world. The Classics is a work of transcendent, even foundational value, often identified particularly with Greek and Roman literature, so taught today in departments of classics, and often closely associated with Imperial values, as Frank Kermode has shown in his book The classic. The masterpiece, on the other hand, can be an ancient or a modern work and not have had any foundational cultural force. Goetha clearly considers his own best works, and those of his friends to be modern masterpieces. The masterpiece indeed came to prominence in the 19th century as literary studies began to de emphasize the dominant Greco Roman classics, elevating the modern masterpiece to a level of near quality with long established classics. In this literary analog of a liberal democracy, the often middle class master works could engage in a great conversation with their aristocratic forebears, a conversation in which their culture and the class of origin matter less than a great ideas they expressed a new. Finally Goethe’s disquisition on Chinese novels and Serbian poems show a nascent interest in works that will serve as windows into foreign lands. Whether or not these works could be construed as masterpieces, and regardless of whether these different worlds had any visible links to each other at all.


The third characteristic of world literature according to Damrosch, is it's nuanced and localized cosmopolitanism.  As Damrosch quotes Bruce Robins,  no one actually is or ever can be a cosmopolitan in the sense of belonging nowhere. The interest of the term cosmopolitanism is located then, not in his theoretical extension, where he becomes a paranoid fantasy of ubiquity and omniscience, but rather paradoxically in his local applications. 

For more details on this third aspect of world literature and how it applies to a certain literary work. one can refer to our forthcoming episode on the Tale of Genji with Professor Edward Kamens at yale University. 


A fourth nature of world literature is its inevitable gain and loss in the process of translation. In particular works of old literature take on new life as they move into the world at large. And to understand this new life, we need to look closely at the ways the work becomes reframed in its translations. And in its new cultural context. Walter Benjamin calls this process as Nach lieben, which means the afterlife of work, which is also a signature work on translation.  Finally let’s hear how European scholars contemplate on the nature of comparative literature.


My name is Ben Hutchinson. I'm professor of European literature at the University of Kent. I'm going to talk to you today about comparative literature. What do you see an inkblot? Some see an abstract cloud, others some form of menacing mask, some see the suggestive spaces. Others focus on the lines that shape them. We can presumably all agree that the two sides of the image are symmetrical. But beyond that, our brains process the information differently, projecting associations and prejudices and hopes and fears onto a shifting undefined object. The image in other words, is only as revealing as the observer, impressionistic as it is, Herman horshack inkblot test offers an instructive analogy for Comparative Literature, understood as the reciprocal study of at least two forms of writing. Comparative Literature is both the most natural and the most constructed of intellectual activities. As we struggle to make sense out of one textual tradition, we instinctively compare it to another text or tradition. One side of the object mirrors and shapes the other, cover half of the image behind me, and it quickly loses any form of structure can also bring a whole set of political, historical and cultural predispositions to the comparison, a perceptual apparatus through which we conjure meaning as we compare it, to use one text to understand another to read Shakespeare's The Tempest alongside montagnes essay on cannibals for instance, or to compare Chinese poetry of the tang period, with European poetry of the modernist period, is to reveal something about one's own tastes and knowledge, if only the belief that there is something meaningful to be learned through contextualize in one's own tastes and knowledge. Comparison clarifies through its very methodology, the reading literature is also reading into literature. For literature exists after all, comparatively, from the dramas of antiquity to the novels of modernity, from Eastern epics to Western classics, there is not a text in history that is truly self sufficient to read and to write is to work within an existing framework of characters, conventions, plots and premises. How we understand one work of literature is contingent on how we understand another work of literature. The more we know, the more we contextualize the more we learn, the more we compare, knowledge itself is comparative. Beyond how we read beyond how we write, comparison is hardwired into the very ways that we think. Well, this makes Comparative Literature among the most ambitious of intellectual disciplines. It also brings the whole undertaking into question for if to read is to compare and the pithy words of George Steiner, one of the most influential of contemporary comparators, then fencing off a protected zone for its pursuit might in fact, seem unnecessary, since we are constantly doing it anyway. What To put it simply, is the force of Comparative Literature, as opposed to that of literature. To answer this question requires delving into the practice the history and the theory of the discipline. Why and indeed, how does one become a comparator just in my case, it began with a passion for languages then for the literature's written in them, and then for how to join the dots between them. The moment the dots start to cohere into a pattern is the moment in which literature becomes truly comparative. And it is amongst the most exhilarating of intellectual experiences, to follow the evolution of the novel from 70s to Calvino to study the history of the sonnet from Petrarch to Pushkin, is to navigate by new and larger constellations drawn on by the delight of making cross cultural connections. Anyone naturally inquisitive, whether with or without foreign language skills can share the satisfaction, curiosity, open mindedness, intellectual ambition, these are the only prerequisites for making comparisons. Well, if there are a few more basic human instincts than the urge to compare scholarly modes of comparison, take this psychological drive and dignify it with disinterest. The context of the observer continues to provide the crucial point of reference Comparative Literature may aspire to the objectivity of a discipline. But in reality, it is deeply complicit in the prejudices and positions that define it. There is in fact no such thing as a single objective sense of Comparative Literature. Almost every comparators has a different idea of how and what to compare, almost every comparators has a different set of priorities. The only consensus is on the inherent instability of the term like governments in a democracy, we have the modes of comparison that we deserve. This instability is the very essence of Comparative Literature. Both its meaning and its methodology depend on unsettling fixed cannons on forging fresh connections and mutually enriching links between disparate texts and traditions, unlike the clearly clearly demarcated fields of national literature's English, French, Russian, etc. Comparative Literature does not have a canon of texts so much as a canon of approaches to texts. Comparative Literature In short, constitutes less a discipline than an in discipline. If this makes it akin to a Rorschach test, it also makes it a mirror for modernity is intellectual anxieties regarding globalization. The what is Comparative Literature, ambitious readers looking to stretch themselves are genuinely intrigued by the concept, but uncertain of its implications. And rightly so in many ways. Even the professionals cannot agree on a single term calling it to take just three examples. Compared in French you clad your compadre comparing in German fig like indelicato versus shaft and comparative in English, where the French past participle suggests that the comparing has already happened. And the German present participle that is in the process of happening, the English additive blurs the distinction between object and observe. The very term itself when considered comparatively opens up a Pandora's box of cultural differences. It this in a nutshell is the whole point should look at literature comparatively it's to realize just how much can be learned. But looking over the horizon of one's own tradition, it is to discover more not only about other literature's but also about one's own. And it is to participate in the great utopian dream of understanding the way cultures interact. In an age that is paradoxically defined by migration and border crossing on the one hand, and by retreat into monolingualism and monocultural ism on the other, the cross cultural agenda of comparative literature has become increasingly central to the future of the humanities. We're all in fact, comparators constantly making connections across languages cultures drawn, as we read, The question is whether we realize it. So the history and theory of Comparative Literature, the history and theory of how literary cultures have learned to view each other. The forces of modernity that give rise to the discipline from colonialism and nationalism, to exile and internationalism, are also the forces that shaped it, sculpting it's project of analogy, antithesis, and cultural differentiation. Comparative Literature, in short, constitutes something like the International Relations of culture. In fact, one doesn't need to look only at the European version of Comparative Literature. And indeed, one doesn't want to go well beyond the merely modern version of Comparative Literature. But the whole idea of European modernity, as we have increasingly learned over recent decades is deeply problematic. Nonetheless, the discipline of Comparative Literature developed in European modernity and to a large extent because of European modernity. So I think I'm gonna concentrate just on that for today. Within modern Europe, then the development of comparative literature as a process of intellectual exchange between nations looks back to the post 1648 idea of national sovereignty, enshrined in the Treaty of Westphalia. To be international first one has to be national. The principle of the balance of power, along with that of religious and by extension, cultural freedom, ensured that the various empires and dominions began to pursue inter inter cultural exchange in you have international war by the 19th century, the era in which the discipline would develop in earnest. This balance of power was reasserted following the upheaval of the Napoleonic Wars by the Congress of Vienna in 1815, which fits the European map for the next 100 years. The fact that the major empires Prussia, Russia, Austria had made major gains made meant that numerous smaller states and languages were now subsumed within their purview. A range of different cultures were housed within a handful of overarching groupings, the better to balance each other out at the supranational level. The conditions for comparison, one might say, We're perfect. Yet for the emerging discipline of Comparative Literature. This Imperial structure created a double bind, since it meant that attempts to overcome national divisions were tied precisely to those divisions, locked into a narrative of competing countries and colonies. Comparison developed in short, within and between nations and empires, Napoleonic Victorian, the Habsburg as much as within and between languages and literature's understood in the geopolitical terms of the 19th century, comparative literature was also competitive literature given such competing narratives, How can the process of comparing best be understood? Perhaps we might usefully begin by viewing it as the search for Master metaphor. The Belgian born critic poet demand, argued that modern literature constructs its own allegories of reading. Comparative Literature by extension constructs metaphors of reading models of how to interpret texts and cultures, between languages and nations. Such metaphors may provisionally be broken down into two groups, those indicating connection or similarity, and those indicating disconnection or difference.

Beginning with the former group, perhaps the most obvious metaphor for the comparative approach to literature is that of the crossroads. Standing at the center of any number of converging routes or spaces Silk Road, the Holy Roman Empire, the Enlightenment Republic of Letters, the comparators surveys and directs the passing traffic. Such a position convert confers numerous advantages, constant stimulation and negotiation exposure to competing perspectives, and privileged access to a range of sources. But it also risks being disorienting placing the comparators at the mercy of chance and circumstance per head spinning furiously, the Road Runner and one of those cartoons where the traffic signs are all flipped around. An alternative increasingly important model of negotiation is that of the marketplace. In an age in which successful authors write as much for the front international as for an international audience, the cross cultural marketability of literature has become a significant criterion in determining what's gets compared and did what gets written already in the 1820s gutter in launching the term World Literature use the metaphor of the marketplace, partly in the Enlightenment sense of a forum for trade and commerce, partly in order to encourage the dissemination of his own works. monetized in this way, the metaphor of the marketplace points towards the socio cultural framework in which Comparative Literature necessarily operates towards the network of publishers, reviewers, translators, and professors who make it possible. Metaphors such as crossroads and marketplace, as well as other more overtly political variations, such as Parliament or United Nations, facilitate interaction between two or more perspectives. Indeed, they mimic the very meaning of metaphor, just as the process of comparison functions as a simile by saying that one thing is like another, so too, it acts as a metaphor from the Greek metaphor Hein, meaning to carry over or transfer, indicating, as it does the ways in which we compare one idea to another. Yet metaphors can be misleading. Sometimes meaning is not so much carried over as intercepted. The Danish critic guild blunders described comparative literature as a telescope that both magnifies and reduces sentences further, but only by focusing on specific objects. An image neatly captures the ambivalent nature of both of comparison and of its attendant metaphors. How are we to understand those metaphors that call into question any easy sentence of comparative literature as simply an intellectual import export business? How are we to understand the mechanisms of difference as well as off similarity, what in short, of what one might term contrastive literature contrastive literature forms the necessary counterpart to Comparative Literature without difference, no similarity in order to say that one thing is like another or must implicitly say what it is not like. To compare presupposes the ability to contrast seen in this way. Comparative Literature is as much about reconfiguring comparisons as making them and accordingly it attracts a corresponding group of metaphors centered on the creation of new perspectives and meanings. Perhaps the most prominent metaphor in this group is that of the melting pot. Unlike the image of the crossroads, which suggests that texts and ideas may take different directions, that will still keep moving in some previously recognizable form, the linguistic melting pot, in pre modernity, Latin or Sanskrit, in post modernity, World Literature in English or French, implies that local ideas undergo a fundamental change of form, in order to find expression within the many variations of one global recipient. Of course, comparison even within one language is not the straightforward, a single pot can contain a multitude of ingredients, ingredients that it is the role of the comparators to to taste and identify. Locating the border between one version of an idea and another, bring them together, but also keeping them apart is an essential aspect of comparatively practice. If the model of the melting pot dissolves conflicting elements as much as it solves them, the idea of comparative literature as a border point, investor comparators with greater powers still, first suggests that she can just as well block the traffic of ideas as allow them safe passage that she is authorized to rifle through texts in search of contraband content. such as, for instance, vestigial colonialism in modern European literature. The comparator sits in judgment on the flow of ideas, with a more or less liberal, more or less laissez faire sensibility. To study the history of the subject, however, is to realize the Comparative Literature is ultimately not so much about policing borders as crossing them. Comparators choose to distance themselves from their own native cultures, they choose not to belong to any one particular tradition. Indeed, this unblocking is arguably the defining characteristic as intellectual emigres comparators make links between cultures, but in doing so, they also paradoxically, reinforce the distinctions between those cultures. As such, the contrasts are as important as the comparisons, the disconnections as instructive as the connections. But Why will my task to such metaphors matter? Why should I? Why should you care about how Comparative Literature views itself? The answer lies not in specialist skirmishes, but in common sense. For in the case of Comparative Literature, the metaphysic lives by or arguably as important as the insights it makes possible. Unlike other disciplines, historically more secure and their intellectual and institutional status. Comparative Literature must constantly renew its sense of mission constantly tell itself a new story about how and why literature's should be compared. It has the continuous need to justify itself to itself that marks out comparative literature as uniquely beholden to changing intellectual fashions, and thus to changing disciplinary metaphors. So what we might provisionally take the adjective comparative to convey is that the idea of comparison, in conjunction with the idea of literature is as important as its practice. The animating impulse of Comparative Literature is not just the urge to take a broad perspective across differing forms and languages of literary expression. It is also the politically ethically and he said actually charged notion that this is a worthwhile undertaking in the first place. Comparative Literature cannot get by, in other words, without a pinch of pathos, since it is the utopian dream of being in no place utopia, US and US in every place that drives it. Comparative Literature is in fact defined by its strategic position between languages literatures, and culture, literary theory, cultural studies, post colonialism, world literature, translation studies, reception studies, Comparative Literature in the 21st century draws on all these disciplines and more. Out of these points of intersection emerge a number of recurring debates, the changing notions of high and popular culture, the shifting hierarchy of original and translated texts, concepts and criticisms of the Canon debates that make Comparative Literature among the most dynamic of intellectual fields, irrigated by any number of sources, it overflows with ideas as to how to conceive the role and purpose of the verbal arts in an ever more visual world. For this, indeed, is perhaps the principal function of Comparative Literature in the 21st century. For ambitious readers with an appetite for arranging beyond their own native traditions, Comparative Literature is the natural home. Yet it is also the natural home for all those big questions about why literature and by extension culture still matters. To compare literature's and cultures must be to do more than merely accrue the sum of their parts. It must be to ponder and to protect cultural relations. The surest way of moving beyond a purely subjective response to the Rorschach test is to study the practice, the history and the theory of Comparative Literature. Thank you very much for your attention.