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World, Literature

World, Literature. The Question…. “What to read and what to do with that reading, that is the full form of the question.” (Said 60, 1993). “The question is not really what we should do—the question is how. ” ( Moretti 54-55, 2000).

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World, Literature

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  1. World, Literature

  2. The Question… “What to read and what to do with that reading, that is the full form of the question.” (Said 60, 1993) “The question is not really what we should do—the question is how.” (Moretti 54-55, 2000) It is time to ask what meaning the world Weltliteraturcan still have if we relate it, as Goethe did, both to the past and to the future. Our earth, the domain of Weltliteratur, is growing smaller and losing its diversity. Yet Weltliteraturdoes not merely refer to what is generically common and human; rather it considers humanity to be the product of fruitful intercourse between its members.” (Auerbach 2, 1952)

  3. Method and Metaphor • Auerbach(1952): philology • Ansatzpunkt • Moretti (2000): distant reading • Waves, trees • Said (1993): contrapuntal reading • Overlapping territories, intertwined histories

  4. Weltliteratur • Goethe 1827, Marx and Engels 1847 • Universal literature, expresses humanity • A concert among all literature produced “by man about man” • Not a selective collection of great books or world classics, nor a best-of collection • Efflorescence of interest in this term in 21st century – why? • Postcolonial studies • Comparative literature

  5. What is World Literature? • world lit is • Work that circulates beyond its culture of origin • A mode of circulation and of reading • Existing definitions: • Established body of classics • Evolving canon of masterpieces • Multiple windows on the world

  6. Auerbach • Humanity as a common conversation among humans • A single shared global culture is precisely not a weltliteratur • Our shared participation in an ongoing seminar on world history • Philology’s special role and relation to history • How to accomplish a major work of synthesis • A point of departure should have • Concreteness and precision • Potential for centrifugal radiation

  7. Auerbach A scientifically ordered and conducted research of reality fills and rules our life; it is, if one wishes to name one, our Myth: we do not possess another that has such general validity. History is the science of reality that affects us most immediately, stirs us most deeply and compels us most forcibly to a consciousness of ourselves. … Whatever we are, we became in history, and only in history can we remain the way we are and develop therefrom: it is the task of philologists, whose province is the world of human history, to demonstrate this so that it penetrates our lives unforgettably. (5-6)

  8. Ansatzpunkt • World literature an individual inquiry because relies heavily on personal intuition • Traditional divisions of material no longer useful, whether chronological, geographical or typological

  9. Ansatzpunkt In order to accomplish a major work of synthesis it is imperative to locate a point of departure, a handle, as it were, by which the subject can be seized. The point of departure must be the election of a firmly circumscribed, easily comprehensible set of phenomena whose interpretation is a radiation out from them and which orders and interprets a greater region than they themselves occupy. … a comparatively modest general knowledge buttressed by advice can suffice once intuition has found an auspicious point of departure. … It is therefore a question of specialization—not a specializing of the traditional modes of classifying material—but of the subject at hand, which needs constant rediscovery. (14-15)

  10. Ansatzpunkt Potential for centrifugal radiation Concreteness and precision

  11. Ansatzpunkt A good point of departure must be exact and objective; abstract categories of one sort or another will not serve. … For a point of departure should not be a generality imposed on a theme from outside, but out rather to be an organic inner part of the theme itself. What is being studied should speak for itself, but that can never happen if the point of departure is neither concrete nor clearly defined. (16)

  12. Distant Reading Ready-made, though rarely suitable, concepts whose appeal is deceptive because it is based on their attractive sound and their modishness, lie in wait, ready to spring in on the work of a scholar who has lost contact with the energy of object of study. Thus the writer of a scholarly work is often ricked into accepting the substitution of a cliché for the true object; surely a great many readers can also be deceived. (Auerbach 16)

  13. Said • discrepant but interacting experiences • affirming interaction and interdependence, avoiding the politics of blame • experiences of imperialism that involve sympathy and congruence, dialogue and communication • Identities understood as not essences but “contrapuntal ensembles” (52) • “structures of attitude and reference” (52)

  14. Said • Structure of the assigned extract • Why, for Said, does the issue of world literature appear only in the fifth section? • Goethe’s weltliteratur waffled between great books and comprehensive synthesis of everything • Imperialism, ideology, the worldliness of any text • his readings • two worlds in one text: Heart of Darkness • one world, two texts: Description de l’Egypteand Aja’ib al-Athar

  15. Graphs and Literary Studies the idea that the comparative study of literature could furnish a trans-national, even trans-human perspective on literary performance. Thus the idea of comparative literature not only expressed universality and the kind of understanding gained by philologists about language families, but also symbolized the crisis-free serenity of an almost ideal realm. Standing above the small-minded political affairs were both a kind of anthropological Eden in which men and women happily produced something called literature, and a world… designated as that of “culture,” where only “the best that is thought and known” could be admitted. (Said 45)

  16. Contrapuntal Reading

  17. 1970s and 1980s the dramatic change in emphasis and, quite literally, direction among thinkers noted for their radicalism. … Foucault also turned his attention away from the oppositional forces in modern society which he had studied for their undeterred resistance to exclusion and confinement… and decided that since power was everywhere it was probably better to concentrate on the individual. The self was therefore to be studied, cultivated, and, if necessary, refashioned and constituted. In both Lyotard and Foucault we find precisely the same trope employed to explain the disappointment in the politics of liberation: narrative, which posits an enabling beginning point and a vindicating goal, is no longer adequate for plotting the human trajectory. … One began to hear and read how futile it was to support revolutions, how barbaric were the new regimes that came to power…. (26-7)

  18. Moretti Trees need geographical discontinuity…; waves dislike barriers, and thrive on geographical continuity…. Trees and branches are what nation-states cling to; waves are what markets do. … Cultural history is made of trees and waves…. This, then, is the basis for the division of labor between national and world literature: national literature, for people who see trees; world literature, for people who see waves. (68)

  19. Distance and Detachment The genuinely profound scholarship of the people who believed in and practiced Weltliteraturimplied the extraordinary privilege of an observer located in the West who could actually survey the world’s literary output with a kind of sovereign detachment. (Said 48) literary history will quickly become very different from what it is now: it will become ‘second hand’: a patchwork of other people’s research, without a single direct textual reading. Still ambitious, and actually even more so than before (world literature!); but the ambition is now directly proportional to the distance from the text: the more ambitious the project, the greater must the distance be. (Moretti57)

  20. Moretti’s graphs To speak of comparative literature therefore was to speak of the interaction of world literatures with one another, but the field was epistemologically organized as a sort of hierarchy, with Europe and its Latin Christian literatures at its center and top. (Said 45)

  21. Law of Literary Evolution the modern novel first arises not as an autonomous development but as a compromise between a western formal influence (usually French or English) and local materials. (58)

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