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LETTERATURA E LETTERATURE
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Direzione
Dante Della Terza, Edoardo Esposito
Comitato scientifico
Anna Maria Carpi, Jonathan Culler, Anne-Rachel Hermetet, †
Antonio Melis, Max Saunders, William Mills Todd III, Jürgen
Wertheimer
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Loreto, Caroline Patey, Emilia Perassi, Damiano Rebecchini
Redazione
Francesca Cuojati, Tiziano Moresi, Laura Neri, Stefania Sini,
Sara Sullam
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Stefano Ballerio([email protected])
Dipartimento di Studi Letterari, Filologici e Linguistici
dell’Università degli Studi di Milano, via Festa del Perdono 7,
20122 Milano
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« Letteratura e letterature » is an International
Peer-Reviewed Journal.The Journal is Indexed and Abstracted in
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The eContent is Archived with Clockss and
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LETTERATURA
E LETTERATURE
1 1 · 2017
PISA · ROMA
FABRIZIO SERRA EDITORE
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Amministrazione e abbonamentiFabrizio Serra editore
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SOMMARIO
Editoriale 9
saggi
Andrea Mirabile, Pound e Pasolini : tra polemica ideologica e
magistero formale 13Carlo Di Alesio, Fortini e De Sanctis : una
fedeltà discreta 23
intorno alla world literature
Paola Loreto, My (Italian) World Lit : The Aesthetics of the
Hermeneutic Circle 37Helena Buescu, World Literature : A
Reinvention of Reading 51Zhang Longxi, Aspects of World Literature
59Jérôme David, From Mysticism to Politics : Martin Bodmer’s
Library of World Literature in Geneva 71Gisèle Sapiro, The Role of
Publishers in the Making of World Literature : The Case of
Gallimard 81Silvia Riva, From Cosmopolitanism to Planetary Metonymy
and Back : Some Rhetorical Considerations in World Literature
95
dagli archivi
Edoardo Esposito, Gli americani di Vittorini 121Elio Vittorini -
William Saroyan, Lettere, a cura di Stefania Garbosi 127Stefania
Garbosi, Nota sulla fortuna di Saroyan 147
note e recensioni
Convegno « Cosmopolis and Beyond : Literary Cosmopolitanism
after the Repu- blic of Letters » (Martina Ciceri) 155Paul Valéry,
Il cimitero marino, a cura di Raul Capra (Carlo Londero)
158Giovanni Giudici : ovvero le fondamenta dell’opera (Stefano
Bassini) 160Yves Bonnefoy, L’écharpe rouge suivi de Deux scènes et
notes conjointes (Emanuele Ronchetti) 161
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https://doi.org/10.19272/201709801006 · «letteratura e
letterature», 11, 2017
ASPECTS OF WORLD LITERATURE
Zhang Longxi
World literature is definitely on the rise in many parts of the
world today. With a number of books, articles, anthologies,
companions, and hand-books published in this newly established
field, with conferences, workshops, and symposia held in many
places in the world, with the success of Harvard’s Institute for
World Literature running as a summer program since 2010, and with a
new Journal of World Literature launched in 2016, there is no doubt
that world literature is the new wave that invigorates literary
studies at the present. Despite all of this, a fundamental question
still needs to be asked : What is world literature ? The question
of definition, as I see it, still needs reconsideration. Understood
liter-ally, the term does not make much sense since most people
read literature in a particular language, and some, scholars in
general and polyglot comparatists in particular, read literature in
several languages, but no one can read all the lan-guages and all
the literatures of the world, and in that sense, literally
speaking, no one reads world literature. The sheer quantity of all
the literatures produced in the world’s various languages makes it
impossible for anyone to read or study world literature as such,
and therefore world literature has to be understood on a different
level and defined as a concept that makes sense. As Franco Moretti
ar-gues, reading « more » is not enough. « It has to be different.
The categories have to be different. » The solution he proposes is
what he calls « distant reading », which « allows you to focus on
units that are much smaller or much larger than the text : devices,
themes, tropes – or genres and systems ». 1 That is to say, world
literature means the study of literature not so much on the level
of individual texts, but on a metatextual level, looking at
collective patterns and trajectories, shapes of literary movement
that tells a story of the transformation of literary genres or
themes. As a system-builder, Moretti studies literature, especially
the novel, in a way that reminds us of the effort made by
structural narratologists in the 1970s, who were mostly interested
in patterns, archetypes, and underlying deep structures. « Dis-tant
reading » thus has the benefit of reducing impossibly large
quantities of liter-ary works to detectable patterns and shapes
that suggest some global structur-ing elements of all literatures.
At the same time, however, « distant reading » also faces similar
problems as narratology did in the heydays of structuralism,
namely, large-scale structural reading may lose the textual nuances
of literary works that need to be at the core of our reading
experience. In other words, distant reading needs to be
supplemented by close reading and textual analysis, which can give
us the gratification of a critical understanding of the aesthetics
of reading.
1 Franco Moretti, Conjectures on World Literature (2000) and
More Conjectures (2003), in World Litera-ture in Theory, ed. David
Damrosch, Chichester, Wiley Blackwell, 2014, p. 160.
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In his influential book, What Is World Literature ? David
Damrosch directly con-fronts the question of definition and
provides an answer in a different manner. Damrosch famously defines
world literature as « all literary works that circulate beyond
their culture of origin, either in translation or in their original
language ». 1 He reiterates this definition when he goes on to say
: « A work enters into world literature by a double process :
first, by being read as literature ; second, by cir-culating out
into a broader world beyond its linguistic and cultural point of
ori-gin ». 2 This definition effectively differentiates world
literature from all the works in national literatures that are not
known beyond the boundaries of their original language and culture,
that is to say, it effectively excludes a very large amount of the
world’s literary productions. In that sense, Damrosch’s definition
reduces the amount of world literature from an impossible
monstrosity to a manageable quantity, at least theoretically. At
the same time, this definition also acknowl-edges the significant
role translation plays in the concept of world literature and calls
for more works that are not yet known beyond their culture of
origin to be translated for global circulation. For most of the
world’s literatures, to be known beyond their culture of origin
means to circulate in translation, since most people read foreign
or world literature not in the original, but in translation.
Literary translation, therefore, becomes an integral part of the
concept of world literature, and questions about the nature and
quality of translation need serious discussion.
For decades, translation studies has of course developed into a
discipline all its own, but much of its discussion has concentrated
on such issues as the puta-tive untranslatability, the translator’s
subjectivity, the deliberate foreignization and opacity of the
translated text, etc. These discussions have made translation more
of a theoretical abstraction than the practical exercise we need in
order to have access to more of the world’s best literary works.
Indeed, untranslatability has become a concept challenging the
possibility of world literature. According to Emily Apter, for
example, world literature has overlooked the importance of «
incommensurability and what has been called the Untranslatable ». 3
In putting translation as part of the conceptualization of world
literature, says Apter, « the right to the Untranslatable was
blindsided », and that « at its very core World Lit-erature seemed
oblivious to the Untranslatable ». 4 Lawrence Venuti, an
influen-tial scholar in translation studies, argues not so much
against translation as such, but certainly makes the untranslatable
a core idea, for he considers translation to be « fundamentally
ethnocentric », and « never simply be communication between equals
», because « the very function of translating is assimilation, the
inscription of a foreign text with domestic intelligibilities and
interests ». He is against the « ethnocentric » nature of
translation and remains skeptical about domestication of foreign
texts, about « any literary translation that mystifies this
inevitable do-
1 David Damrosch, What Is World Literature ?, Princeton,
Princeton University Press, 2003, p. 4. 2 Ibidem, p. 6. 3 Emily
Apter, Against World Literature : On the Politics of
Untranslatability, London, Verso, 2013, p. 3. 4 Ibidem, pp.
8-9.
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mestication as an untroubled communicative act. Good translation
is demystify-ing », he declares ; « it manifests in its own
language the foreignness of the foreign text ». 1 Venuti views
translation in terms of relationships of power and domi-nance, and
in that view translation seems always exerts power over the foreign
text and erases its foreignness in an act of cultural assimilation
and appropriation. In other words, what seems smooth and highly
readable translation covers up what should be foreign and
essentially untranslatable.
As Susan Bassnett remarks, Venuti advocates foreignization as «
a strategic in-tervention that would challenge the hegemony of
English », while he sees do-mestication, the transparency of
translation, as « a discursive strategy that is both
ethnocentrically violent and deceptive, in that it conceals the
violence through the illusion of transparency ». 2 In such an
understanding, then, foreignization is taken to be an « ethical »
stance that keeps the foreign text foreign, while domes-tication or
transparency is « mystifying » the translated text. As a result,
transla-tion is impossibly demanded to be as close to the foreign
original as possible and thus defeats its purpose of being
translation, that is, to render what is foreign and unintelligible
into something intelligible and comprehensible to facilitate
under-standing and communication. Since Friedrich Schleiermacher’s
famous essay on the two methods of translation, foreignization and
domestication have been kept in an unreasonable opposition, but in
actual practice, both methods are necessary and useful. Excessive
domestication that results in the distortion of the foreign
original is certainly objectionable, and in that sense Venuti’s
objection to domes-tication is justifiable, but foreignization has
its own violent side that may have escaped Venuti’s attention.
Excessive foreignization is equally questionable from a moral point
of view because it perpetrates an act of violence to the foreign
text, an act to make the foreign original disconcertingly strange,
alien, and exotic. In fact, if a translation « manifests in its own
language the foreignness of the foreign text », it will inevitably
produce a translation that seems a strange, exotic, and unreadable
text, a text with qualities that are absolutely alien to the
original text, which is not « foreign » at all to its original
readers in its native culture of origin. Such a strange and
foreignized translation may serve the purpose of illustrating a
theoretical point, but hardly serviceable to most readers. There is
nothing inher-ently ethical about foreignization as such.
The moral stance against the « hegemony of English » apparently
underpins the objection to domestication, but it becomes a problem
in reality when it also ob-jects to readability and fluency in
translation. It is true that English has become the de facto lingua
franca in today’s world not just for business transactions, but
also for international communication and cultural exchange. Lingua
franca is the means of communication in a large area, and in
today’s world English is such a common language just like Latin in
medieval and early modern Europe or Chi-nese in pre-modern East
Asia. In the literary and cultural sphere, a work has a
1 Lawrence Venuti, The Scandals of Translation : Towards an
Ethics of Difference, London, Routledge, 1998, p. 11. 2 Susan
Bassnett, Translation, London, Routledge, 2014, p. 48.
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better chance to become known beyond its original environment in
a national language and culture if and when it is translated into
English and starts to circu-late globally. The nature of
translation is determined by who translates and how the translation
is done, not by the language used for the translation. The
argu-ment that using English in translation necessarily does
violence to the foreign original is based on the dubious
Sapir-Whorfian hypothesis that the language one uses determines the
way one thinks, which constitutes a strong linguistic deter-minism
that can be easily disproved by the very fact that people using the
same language in the same linguistic community may hold very
different views and debate on fundamentally different positions and
stances. All the extravagant and fashionable arguments about
untranslatability or foreignization as inherently eth-ical would
result in keeping the foreign from being known and circulating in
the world ; in the discussion of world literature, that would mean
to leave all those great works in different national traditions
untranslated, even untranslatable, and thereby keep the already
well-known Western canonical works unchallenged in their position
of real hegemony. In my view, world literature is not just the
great Western canon, though that is extremely important and
deserves to be continu-ally discussed and studied, but world
literature is much more than that ; it should expand to include all
the canonical works in the world’s different national litera-tures
and traditions. Because most of the great works in non-Western
literatures and even in the ‘minor’ literary traditions in Europe
are not readily available in translation and not discussed from a
global perspective of comparative studies, much of world literature
in its true sense is still unknown and remains to be dis-covered
through translation and critical analyses. We need therefore to
rethink translation and translation studies, and open up
possibilities of adequate literary translation for the study of
world literature in a truly global context.
In Damrosch’s definition of world literature, circulation is the
key term that brings a work of literature from its native and local
context into that of the world. Circulation by itself, however,
does not seem to me an adequate qualifier of world literature,
because many internationally circulating works, such as
best-sellers gaining spectacular commercial success in the world’s
book market, are not necessarily the best of literary works, though
I do not mean to say that best-sellers are by definition devoid of
literary values. Indeed, what is needed in the definition of world
literature is the necessary component of literary or aesthetic
values ; that is to say, world literature is the world’s best
literary works that have been recognized in literary criticism for
their superb quality as literature and for their high literary
values. Of course, speaking of value and value judgment is a tricky
and even risky business, and since Northrop Frye, much of Western
criti-cism has shunned value judgment altogether. « Comparative
estimates of value are really inferences », says Frye, « most valid
when silent ones, from critical prac-tice, not expressed principles
guiding its practice ». 1 For Frye with a desire to make
1 Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism : Four Essays, Princeton,
Princeton University Press, 1957, p. 25.
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literary criticism a science, value judgment is not rigorous or
objective enough to be part of the conceptual structure of
criticism. In more recent critical and theoretical arguments, value
judgment tends to be dismissed for very different reasons, mainly
for being the imposition of a hegemonic ideology or repressive
power. Much of contemporary criticism conforms to one form or
another of an extreme egalitarianism, which makes any
differentiation and value judgment sus-pect of « metaphysical
hierarchy » or political repression. And yet, value judgment always
exists, if not as a public discourse, then surreptitiously as a
privately and tacitly held criterion that underpins any argument.
Frye may not have argued for value judgment, but his discussion of
literature is always using Western canonical works to make his
theoretical point. Literary criticism necessarily makes value
judgment, and in all cultures, critics and scholars have already
established a liter-ary tradition of canonical works that
constitute the very pillar of that tradition, the best and most
valuable works that are vehicles of the most important values of
their culture and tradition. These literary canons are highly
respected in their own traditions for their literary values and
exemplary use of language, and what is needed for world literature
is the transference of values from a national to a global context,
that is to say, world literature needs critical arguments that
per-suades readers to read a literary work beyond its original
linguistic and cultural context, to convince readers on a global
scale why a particular work is valuable and worth reading.
This is what I see as the important work for literary scholars
to do. From Hom-er and Dante to Shakespeare and Goethe, from
Dickens and Balzac to Proust and Virginia Woolf, major Western
works have long been recognized, appreci-ated and studied as world
literary canons. Outside the Western canon, however, equally
important works in the world’s many other literary traditions
remain lo-cally appreciated and studied, but not circulating in the
world as part of world literature. We need to make those works
available in good translations and dis-cussed in persuasive
critical arguments so that they may join the Western ca-nonical
works to form the canon of world literature. I said canon because
in all literary traditions, there are always certain works that
have been regarded as the best and the greatest of a particular
literature and form the literary canon of that particular
tradition. In other words, in the world’s various literary and
cultural traditions, there are canonical works that have already
been judged as the most important and valuable, and now it is the
task of scholars in the study of world literature to make those
national or regional canonical works valued and appreci-ated beyond
their culture of origin, that is, to make them part of world
literature. If world literature is to include only the best of the
world’s various traditions, it should be a collection and
integration of literary canons from different traditions. But how
do we know which works are canonical in different traditions,
especial-ly traditions outside the well-known European canon,
canonical works in non-European traditions and ‘minor’ literatures
written in ‘less studied’ languages, including ‘minor’ literatures
in Europe itself ? What are the best works in Persian and Arabic
literature, in African and Australian literature, in Dutch, Polish,
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dinavian, or Serbian literature ? Canon and literary criticism
are closely related, so we need scholars and critics from different
cultural traditions to argue for the canonicity and value of the
best works in their traditions, and convince us why a particular
work is valuable and worth reading beyond its original environment.
From this perspective, then, it becomes clear that world literature
should include the world’s canonical works not just from major
traditions like English, French, German, Spanish or Italian
literatures, but much more from hitherto globally un-recognized
literary canons, and that literary criticism and scholarly argument
are needed to make the case of the canonicity and value of a
particular work or group of works. In that sense, then, much of
world literature is yet unknown and yet to be discovered from a
global perspective.
Here it is helpful to revisit the moment that has become so
important in discus-sions of world literature, that is, the
originary moment when Johann Wolfgang von Goethe announced the
advent of Weltliteratur at the beginning of the 19th century.
Though Goethe was not the first to coin that term in German, given
his great reputation and influence on the European cultural scene
in the late 18th and the early 19th centuries, as John Pizer
remarks, « it is Goethe to whom credit must be given for creating
the paradigm that became a significant, widely debated ele-ment in
critical and pedagogical literary discourse ». 1 More
significantly, Goethe spoke of Weltliteratur when he talked with
Johann Peter Eckermann about his ex-perience of reading a Chinese
novel in translation, which prompted him to think of literature as
a world phenomenon beyond national traditions. The Chinese novel
was certainly foreign to him, but at the same time he felt he could
fully understand the moral characters of this foreign novel, and
thus Goethe made the famous announcement that « poetry is the
universal possession of mankind. [...] National literature is now
rather an unmeaning term ; the epoch of world literature is at
hand, and every one must strive to hasten its approach ». 2 It is
true that Goethe argued for returning to the ancient Greeks for
patterns of European literature, but his concept of Weltliteratur
did open up to non-Western literatures and represented the spirit
of cosmopolitanism, which Goethe embraced fully in his time,
clearly seen in his admiration of the Persian poet Hafiz, his
interest in Chinese novels, and his enthusiastic advocacy of a
truly global Weltliteratur.
Goethe’s concept, as Richard Meyer argued in 1900, was «
future-oriented », a concept that « had just dawned » in his time.
3 Comparative literature started in Eu-rope in the late 19th
century did go beyond national literary traditions, but it lacked
the cosmopolitan spirit Goethe embraced, as it was mainly comparing
literatures within limits of the major European traditions. In the
early days of European com-
1 John Pizer, Johann Wolfgang Goethe : Origins and Relevance of
Weltliteratur, in The Routledge Com-panion to World Literature,
eds. Theo D’haen, David Damrosch, and Djelal Kadir, London,
Routledge, 2012, p. 3.
2 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Conversations with Eckermann on
Weltliteratur (1827), trans. John Oxenford, in World Literature in
Theory, ed. David Damrosch, cit., pp. 19-20.
3 Monika Schmitz-Emans, Richard Meyer’s Concept of World
Literature, trans. Mark Schmitt, in The Routledge Companion to
World Literature, eds. D’haen, Damrosch, and Kadir, cit., p.
50.
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parative literature, disciplinary vigor required native or
near-native proficiency in ten languages, the formidable
Dekaglottismus, but all the ten languages are Euro-pean. In
reality, all comparative studies have largely been restricted to
European or Western works. Franco Moretti puts it bluntly : «
comparative literature has not lived up to » Weltliteratur as
Goethe had in mind. « It’s been a much more mod-est intellectual
enterprise, fundamentally limited to Western Europe, and mostly
revolving around the river Rhine (German philologists working on
French litera-ture) ». 1 In the early 1970s, René Etiemble already
put forward Goethe’s Weltlit-eratur as an alternative to
comparative literature despite the latter’s cosmopolitan intention
and emphasis on polyglottism. « The time is over when the Hungarian
savant Hugo von Meltzl, a disciple of Goethe and advocate of
Weltliteratur, could still propose a Dekaglottismus as the
languages of civilization : German, English, Spanish, Dutch,
Hungarian, Icelandic, Italian, Portuguese, Swedish and French – to
which he added Latin », Etiemble argued, and he pointed out that
outside these European languages, literatures in Sanskrit, Chinese,
Japanese, Indian, Per-sian, and Arabic had produced masterpieces «
when most of the literatures of the Dekaglottismus either did not
exist, or were still in their infancy ». 2 He criticized Western
anthologies and bibliographies of world literature for neglecting
non-Western literary works, and his advocacy of non-European
literature was an im-portant but somewhat lone voice in European
scholarship. Things did not change until the mid-1990s when, for
example, the influential Norton Anthology of World Literature made
some major changes and included non-Western works in an ‘ex-panded’
edition ; but since then world literature has been on the rise as
indeed the economic, social, and political structuring of our world
is changing and becomes increasingly globalized. Therefore, it is
perhaps in our time, when scholars every-where have a strong sense
of global connectedness and feel the need to be open to other
cultures and literatures beyond one’s own, that Goethe’s
cosmopolitan idea of Weltliteratur has a much better chance to
become reality in comparative literary studies.
At the same time, we cannot ignore difficulties and challenges
to world lit-erature today that still exist and come from different
positions and perspectives. There are also internal difficulties,
so to speak, in the usual discussion of world literature by
scholars who have contributed to the rise of world literature in
the West. For example, both Franco Moretti and Pascale Casanova
have made important arguments for world literature based in one way
or another on the world-systems theory put forward by Immanuel
Wallerstein. Drawing on such a
1 Franco Moretti, Conjectures on World Literature (2000) and
More Conjectures (2003), in World Litera-ture in Theory, ed. David
Damrosch, cit., p. 160.
2 René Etiemble, Should We Rethink the Notion of World
Literature ? (1974), in World Literature in The-ory, ed. David
Damrosch, cit., p. 88. It is only fair to point out, however, that
Meltzl was well aware of the problem of focusing purely on European
literature, as he criticized August Koberstein for tracing the
aubade to Wolfram von Eschenbach without knowing « the fact that
Lieder of this type were sung eighteen centuries ago in China (as
those contained in the Shih Ching) and are frequently found among
the folksongs of modern peoples, for instance, the Hungarians »
[See Hugo Meltzl, Present Tasks of Comparative Literature (1877),
ibidem, p. 37].
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world-systems theory and Fredric Jameson’s « law of literary
evolution », Moretti argues that the modern novel develops from
European centers of metropolitan culture to non-European
peripheries, « as a compromise between a western for-mal influence
(usually French or English) and local materials ». 1 Moretti’s
con-cept of the modern novel is remarkably effective in its
explanatory power, but the center-periphery model and, for that
matter, the world-systems theory on which it depends fail to
recognize the resilience of local traditions that are much more
than just « local materials », but constitute a crucial internal
context for the development of the novel in the peripheries. In
other words, the relationship be-tween the local and the global is
not a simple center-periphery dichotomy, even though the modern
novel in the peripheries is indeed under a heavy Western influence.
In the case of the Chinese novel, for example, influential
intellectuals of the May Fourth new culture movement during the
early twentieth century, radical iconoclastic figures like Lu Xun
and Hu Shih sharply criticized traditional Chinese culture, but
they also looked to China’s past in addition to the West. Lu Xun
wrote one of the earliest histories of the classical Chinese novel,
and Hu Shih advocated the reexamination of China’s classical
tradition and revolutionized the study of the great
eighteenth-century Chinese novel Hong Lou Meng or Dream of the Red
Chamber, also known as The Story of the Stone, which remains a
major influence on almost all modern Chinese writers. That is to
say, modern Chinese novel as a genre, though certainly under the
influence of Western models, cannot be completely separated from
traditional Chinese novels and traditional Chinese literature in
general.
The world-systems theory is in fact based on European history
and the mod-ernization process, and its limitations become clear
when it forms the basic frame for discussing of world literature.
This is particularly evident in the case of Pas-cale Casanova’s
idea of the « world republic of letters ». Describing the formation
of the world’s literary space « as the product of a historical
process », Casanova maintains that
it appeared in Europe in the 16th century, France and England
forming its oldest regions. It was consolidated and enlarged into
central and eastern Europe during the 18th and espe-cially the 19th
centuries, propelled by Herderian national theory. It expanded
throughout the 20th century, notably through the still-ongoing
decolonization process : manifestos proclaiming the right to
literary existence or independence continue to appear, often
lin-ked to movements for national self-determination. 2
Casanova’s account of the historical process of the formation of
« world republic of letters » is essentially the history of
European expansion in the colonialist era and the subsequent
decolonization in the mid-twentieth century, with Europe,
particularly France, playing the decisive role. Such a historical
account com-pletely ignores the Hellenistic and Roman world in
antiquity and neglects the formation of literary constellations
outside Europe, such as the Persian and the
1 Franco Moretti, Conjectures on World Literature (2000) and
More Conjectures (2003), ibidem, p. 163. 2 Pascale Casanova,
Literature as a World (2005), ibidem, p. 195.
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Ottoman empires, or the East Asian world with the Chinese
written language and culture playing a pivotal role in pre-modern
times. Many have complained about Casanova’s Paris-centered view,
which, as Alexander Beecroft argues, « cannot account for the full
range of literary production across all cultures and times. […]
Forms of literary circulation which predate French literary
culture, or which exist outside it today, have no real place in
Casanova’s world-system ». 1 Aamir Mufti also criticizes Casanova
for missing the « philological revolution » in Ori-ental studies,
when « non-Western textual traditions made their first entry as
lit-erature, sacred and secular, into the international literary
space that had emerged in early modern times in Europe ». Because
of such blind spots, Mufti continues, Casanova fails to see
non-Western literatures in world literary space until the middle of
the twentieth century, as a result of decolonization, when « such
figures as Kateb Yacine, V. S. Naipaul, and Salman Rushdie and the
psychology of assimi-lation into metropolitan languages and
cultures typify the non-Western writer ». 2 Therefore, the
formation of Casanova’s world literary space depicts European
influence, and more specifically Parisian influence, as radiating
outward onto the rest of the world, a picture definitely modern in
nature, but inaccurate insofar as world history is concerned, and
unhelpful in theoretical terms. World literature in its true sense
must go beyond conscious and unconscious Eurocentric influ-ence and
transcend any other ethnocentrism.
To reiterate the points with which we began, world literature is
not and cannot be the simple conglomeration of all the literary
works written in the world, but only the very best works from the
world’s different literatures, particularly liter-ary traditions
that have not been well studied beyond their native environment.
That is to say, world literature still needs to establish its canon
by including great works of literature not just from the major
traditions of Western Europe, but also literary traditions in other
parts of the world as well as the ‘minor’ or insufficiently studied
literatures in Europe and North America. World literature should
include canonical works well established in literary traditions,
not just works in modern time. Much of these works are not yet
well-known globally, so they need not only to be translated into
English and other major languages, but also analyzed and studied to
make their values appreciated by readers who would otherwise not be
able to know them. Here again we realize how important literary
translation is for the concept of world literature, and with it
also the challenges and debates. In opening up to translations,
world literature differs from comparative literature with its
traditional disciplinary requirement of native or near-native
proficiency in French, German, and Latin. Traditional elite
comparative literature programs, as David Damrosch observes, « had
a real distaste for translation ». 3 « No self-re-specting program
» in the 1970s, says Damrosch, « could wish to be seen as the
edu-
1 Alexander Beecroft, World Literature without a Hyphen :
Towards a Typology of Literary Systems (2008), ibidem, p. 182.
2 Aamir R. Mufti, Orientalism and the Institution of World
Literature (2010), ibidem, p. 315. 3 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak,
David Damrosch, Comparative Literature / World Literature : A
Discussion (2011), ibidem, p. 366.
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cational equivalent of the food court in ‘the Mall of America’
». 1 But comparative literature’s requirement of working with
original languages rarely crosses over huge linguistic gaps of
different language groups, particularly across European and Asian
languages. For example, the study of Chinese literature has largely
re-mained within limits of Sinology and has rarely participated in
comparative stud-ies, while comparative literature in the West has
remained mostly within limits of European languages and
literatures. As a result, many great works of Chinese literature
remain known in the West only in a small circle of Sinologists,
despite the long history of Chinese literature and the rich
treasure of its canonical works. An important task for comparatists
and scholars of Chinese literature is thus to change the situation
and make canonical Chinese works known beyond its na-tional
boundaries. It is the task of students of world literature to cross
over the divide between European centers and non-European
peripheries, and to acquire languages that are different not just
within one group, European, Asian, African, etc., but across
linguistic groups. The study of world literature must have a broad
horizon and a global perspective, with works discussed from
literary traditions on different continents. Such a cultural
cartography is important if we want to take the term « world »
seriously in « world literature ».
World literature is a concept that always changes in response to
local needs and contexts. At the same time, the competiveness and
highly selective nature of im-portant works that have secured a
place within world literature yield a relatively stable set of
canonical works from the world’s different literary traditions.
World literature brings us back from too abstract theorizing to the
reading of great lit-erature, and it brings back the sense of
literary values we appreciate in all great works of literature. In
a way it also strengthens our sense of the value of human-istic
studies, or simply human values, the important values so often
neglected and ignored in a world that often looks too exclusively
at gains and profits, at practicality without spiritual meaning or
intellectual merits. World literature is our way to reclaim the
value of the humanities, and that may in part explain the reason of
its appeal, the secret of its undeniable success.
Abstract
La World Literature può essere definita, secondo Damrosch, come
quella che circola in un mondo che non è limitato al luogo
linguistico e culturale che l’ha vista nascere. Il problema,
tuttavia, è quello della lingua che consente una simile
circolazione e che non può essere sempre e semplicemente quella
inglese. La World Literature va ben al di là di quanto propone il
grande canone occidentale, e deve includere tutte le opere
considerate canoniche nei differenti ambiti e tradizioni nazionali.
È necessario tenere presente, nella definizione di WL, ciò che si
ritiene dotato di valore estetico e letterario, integrando il
canone occidentale con ciò che appartiene alle diverse tradizioni
culturali.
What is World Literature ? According to Damrosch, World
Literature is what circulates into a broader world beyond its
linguistic and cultural point of origin. The problem how-
1 Ibidem, p. 368.
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aspects of world literature 69
ever, is the language that allows this circulation, which cannot
be always and simply the English one. WL is much more than what the
great Western canon proposes, and should include all the canonical
works in the world’s different national literatures and traditions.
We need therefore to include in the definition of WL the necessary
component of literary or aesthetic values, maybe through a
collection and integration of literary canons from different
traditions, in and outside the Western world.
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