The Perils of World Literature (2006)

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The Perils of World Literature Author(s): William Atkinson Source: World Literature Today, Vol. 80, No. 5 (Sep. - Oct., 2006), pp. 43-47Published by: University of OklahomaStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40159193Accessed: 27-08-2014 01:38 UTC

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Above: Duncan Grant (1885-1978), Pa/r?e/a

Fry Diamand, ca. 191 1-12, oil on canvas

Courtesy: Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art, University of Oklahoma, Gift of Dr. Mark Allen Everett, 2006

w V orld V orld literature not only has a venerable journal devoted to its discussion, it is also taught to undergradu- ates - and very extensively taught. According to Peter J. Simon, vice president and editor at W.W. Norton, world literature surveys enroll at almost 75 percent of the American literature survey totals. In the United States, survey courses are mostly taught as part of the general education core; those teaching them usually have graduate training in what they teach. The instructors for a sur-

vey of British literature from the romantics to the present

WILLIAM ATKINSON

will have taken graduate courses in much of the period and have written a dissertation or a thesis on a particular feature of the period.

It cannot be the same with the world literature

surveys taught within the core. I am not aware of any universities that grant doctorates in world literature, that

prepare candidates to teach in any given year Gilgamesh, the Odyssey, Sakuntala, Tang dynasty poetry, and selec- tions from the Mahabharata, the Tale of Genji, the Divine

Comedy, Don Quixote, and The Story of the Stone. World

September-October 2006 | 43



literature is a subject of study but not a discipline whose

protocols can be easily determined. What exactly is this

subject that so many of us teach? I would argue that a discussion of the nature of world literature, both as a dis-

ciplinary and pedagogical entity, is particularly timely because it has changed very considerably in the past few years, metamorphosing from Western literature in

disguise to something more genuinely representative of most of the world's literary cultures, and thereby it has come to embody some of the academy's core values.

First, I want to address the question of who might have the authority to define world literature. In a recent collection of essays, Debating World Literature (2004), most of the American contributors are associated with

language and comparative literature departments, and the contributors from England look as if they would find homes in such departments were they to leave

Cambridge. The editors of The Norton Anthology of World Literature look like a very similar group, although they usually have a designated association with a particular language. None of them appears to be a specialist in world literature as a whole but rather in one or two literatures of the world. Their authority comes from their being specialists in the literatures of particular languages. The authority of the contributors in Debating World Literature, on the other hand, comes from their

being comparatists. For comparatists, world literature has a history, and

it begins on January 31, 1827, when Goethe remarked: "National literature is now rather an unmeaning term; the epoch of world literature is at hand, and everyone must strive to hasten its approach" {Conversations 165-66). Goethe seems to have been thinking of a state of literary affairs that was yet to come. An independent, or national, literature might be defined as the product of writers within particular boundaries in conversation with one another across space and time, but Goethe was

looking forward to a time when writers from all over the world would become aware of one another's work. In 1828 he wrote to the Society of Natural Philosophers in Berlin:

If we have dared proclaim the beginning of a Euro- pean, indeed a world literature, this does not merely mean that the various nations will take note of one another and their creative efforts, for in that sense a world literature has been in existence for some time, and is to some extent continuing and developing. We mean, rather, that contemporary writers and all par- ticipants in the literary scene are becoming acquainted

The valorization

of difference and

specificity has led

to the kind of

world literature

anthologies we

now have, but it

has also made it

both theoretically and practically

impossible to

teach the new

world literature.

55

44 I World Literature Today



currents

and feel the need to take action as a group because of inclination and public-spiritedness. (Essays on Art and Literature 225)

Goethe is calling for an imagined community of all the world's writers.

There was something of a pan-European literature

by the beginning of the twentieth century, if not earlier, and it was swiftly carried to all those parts of the globe where European guns and money prevailed. But while Tanizaki Junichiro, the early-twentieth-century Japanese novelist, read Joyce, the compliment was not returned. World literature was becoming Europeanized. By the second half of the last century, however, the formal and informal empires were writing back and being read

throughout the world. The existence of an international group of writers

who are more or less aware of one another's work might be taken to constitute a truly world literature, a com-

munity of readers and writers not defined by nation. This development could well be part of the reason for the current interest in the subject. But at about the same time that Goethe was first talking about world literature, another meaning of the word literature was evolving, and literature as a subject of study began to emerge. In about 1800, literature meant little more than what was

being written at the time. Over the course of the nineteenth century, literature came increasingly to refer to an archive of writing already written, an archive waiting to be studied. In this process, Stefan Hoesel-Uhlig sees the development of literary historiography as crucial because it offered "a novel, retrospective focus for cultural self-understanding" (46). The key to the culture is to be found in its literature, and because the nineteenth

century was much preoccupied with national cultures, the study of literature became deeply imbricated with the development of national consciousness and patriotic values.

In Europe, elite education had long concentrated on the Greek and Latin classics. Free universal education could not aspire to such heights, but it is by no means certain that it would have wanted to. After all, Virgil was not an Englishman, nor a German, nor even an Ital- ian. So all English children read Shakespeare, Germans read Goethe, and Italians read Dante. All these men were, as is well known, universal geniuses! At the same time, they were also often said to represent the genius of their nations. If the teacher's charges thus went away thinking that their particular nation had a monopoly on universals, there were many teachers who would not

wish to disabuse them of such a view - or so the history of Europe in the first half of the twentieth century would

suggest. The idea of a literature representing its culture is

now considerably problematized with the increasing perception of nations as multicultural entities. Until quite recently, a fairly limited number of largely white male writers were allowed to speak for most of the nations of

Europe and North America. Around the middle of the twentieth century, world literature began to appear in North American course offerings. But the American idea of world literature was far from what Goethe seems to have had in mind. As short a time ago as 1995, the stan- dard Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces was made up almost entirely of European and North American texts. World literature in American colleges meant European literature in translation.

The first such Norton anthology appeared in 1956. A comment from the preface to the 1995 expanded edition still represents midcentury thinking on why American

sophomores needed some familiarity with the European literary tradition.

Whatever our individual or ethnic associations may be, if we live in the United States it is important to understand the moral and intellectual sources of the country that we inhabit and that in some inescapable sense inhabits us. ... So far as our collective life in this country has roots, these are to be found in the Western tradition, whose influence in the fabric of our everyday existence is best discovered by immersion in its recognized masterpieces of drama, poetry, and fiction, (xxxii)

The dominant culture of America has evolved from

European origins, runs the argument, and these origins still "inhabit us.r/ This claim is even stronger than Hoesel-

Uhlig's "retrospective focus for cultural self-understand-

ing/7 By the late twentieth century, however, it was well

accepted in the academy that the United States was not so fully European as it had been convenient to think, so some African and Asian material was included in the new canon of world literature in order to answer the needs of those Americans who were inhabited by different "moral and intellectual sources" and needed a different "focus for cultural self-understanding."

The Norton Anthology notwithstanding, by 1995 the

academy had been living with the Other for a couple of decades, and the Other needed to be heard. The editors of the expanded Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces acknowledged its call.




Still, our central objective in this Expanded Edition is to encourage exploration of other traditions as well. As in the forest world the effect of roots is the produc- tion of spreading leaves and branches and the effects of spreading leaves and branches is the invigoration of roots, so in our human world the vigor of cultural traditions thrives rather from reaching out than from closing in. All over the planet there flourish faiths, fears, arts, and aspirations; needs and markets, likes and dislikes; racial, gender, and ethnic tensions - mat- ters that our shrinking planet of airplanes, television, computer networks, and long-range nuclear missiles has made it materially important for us to know about as well as intellectually and spiritually foolish to ignore. Hostilities at all levels are usually first gener- ated and then exacerbated by xenophobia ("fear of the stranger") and by the ease with which the unfamiliar book, picture, food, custom, costume, or skin color can be demonized. For this phobia the only cure is frequent and prolonged exposure to what is different from ourselves until the unfamiliar becomes familiar, the unaccustomed perspective brings more generous ways of seeing, and we discover how much there is still to learn about ourselves, (xxxiii)

By this account, studying world literatures is a desen-

sitizing procedure, while the claiming of all benefits -

material, intellectual, and spiritual - tries to appeal to

everyone and thereby risks directly touching no one.

Interestingly, the paragraph closes with a very similar claim for the value of the study of non- Western literature as had been made for the study of the Western tradition: a better understanding of ourselves. It comes back to us and what we need. Otherness is thereby at risk of being erased by becoming part of us.

The transition from world literature = Western literature to world literature = the literatures of most of the world was remarkably sudden. When the world literature course consisted entirely of Western texts, there was no

great difficulty in finding fairly well-prepared people to teach it. After all, half the texts could be English, and how weird can Dante be? He was, after all, a Christian. Of course, no one with a historicist background would

say any such thing today. And here is the source of the double bind in which the world literature course now finds itself. In the days when everyone was a basic for- malist, all texts from all places from all times could, in

principle, be treated much the same. I say "in principle" because specialization has, in fact, been with us for a long time. But the valorization of the universal has also been around for a long time and, in nonacademic reviewing

and Norton introductory material, is still very much with us. If a text is dubbed universal, it can, supposedly, thereby speak to and for all of us. And if we find it pos- sesses universal values, it has spoken to us, so we are the determiners of the universal. But most new Ph.D.s come with a roughly historicist training and therefore value the contingency and specificity of texts. Shakespeare lived in a particular place at a particular time, and it is necessary to know a good deal about that time and

place if we are to understand what is going on in his texts. Our new critical assumption is that roots cannot survive once extracted from their soil. The valorization of difference and specificity has led to the kind of world literature anthologies we now have, but it has also made it both theoretically and practically impossible to teach the new world literature. A proper understanding of a cultural artifact requires an appreciation of the culture's difference from our own. But what individual could pos- sibly have sufficient preparation to do justice to so many texts from so many moments and so many places? Yet unless students are introduced to these different cultures

through their texts, the cultures will remain objects of, at best, indifference or, at worst, suspicion and contempt.

In contrast to the 1995 Norton world literature

anthology, the preface to the sixth edition of the Norton

Anthology of English Literature (1993) makes no elaborate claims for its offerings. The first sentence describes the volumes as designed for courses that "introduce students to the unparalleled excellence and variety of

English literature." Such courses, they say, are "indis-

pensable" (xxxv), but the editors offer no justification for the adjective. Seven years later, "indispensable'' is gone, and the editors restrict themselves to a comment on the

"joys" associated with the literature's "abundance" (7th ed., xxxiii). But the abundance is increasingly plural. Few scholars would now accept the earlier view of a British literature that constituted a single literary tradition. The literatures of the British Isles are multiple, and to judge by the contents of the anthologies, British is becoming a convenient term subsuming anything written in English that does not originate from the United States.

Similar moves are afoot in American literature. The editors of the fifth edition of the Heath Anthology of American Literature (2005) regard American literature as a chorus of voices. "Heath," they write, "maintains its

emphasis on the multiple origins and histories of the cultures of the United States." And they "are increasingly interested in the ongoing conversations among these cultures . . . and just how these conversations have come

46 I World Literature Today



currents

to define America as plural, complex, heterogeneous - a chorus, perhaps, rather than a melting pot" (Lauter and Leveen).

It might be argued that the editors of British and American anthologies are simply climbing onto the glo- balizing bandwagon. Universities and colleges are going through a fresh round of core curriculum reform, and the word international is nearly always somewhere in the mission statement. And while to some people globaliza- tion means Americanization, the academy, on the whole, is committed to a worldview that values plurality, het-

erogeneity, and difference. Whereas, fifty years ago, the course offerings in American or British literature might be assumed to communicate the core values of our West- ern culture, today, if literary studies communicate any significant values at all, these values are most securely established in the world literature course.

Appalachian State University

Editorial note: For more on world literature in the pages of WLT, see David Damrosch, "What Is World Literature?" April-June 2003, 9-14. Also see the essays collected in the "Perspectives on World Literature" section of the Twayne Companion to Contemporary World Literature: From the Editors of World Literature Today, ed. Pamela A. Genova (New York: Twayne, 2003), 11-103.

WORKS CITED

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Essays on Art and Literature. Ed. John Gearey. Tr. Ellen von Nardroff & Ernest H. von Nardroff. Vol. 3 of Goethe's Collected Works. New York: Suhrkamp Publishers New York, 1986.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, and Johann Peter Ecker- mann. Conversations of Goethe with Johann Peter Ecker- mann. Ed. J. K. Moorhead. Tr. John Oxenford. 1930. New York: Da Capo, 1998.

Hoesel-Uhlig, Stefan. "Changing Fields: The Direction of Goethe's Weltliteratur." In Debating World Literature. Ed.

Christopher Prendergast. London: Verso, 2004. Lauter, Paul, and Lois Leveen. "Heath Orientation." In The

Heath Anthology of American Literature. 5th ed. General ed. Paul Lauter. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006.

Norton Anthology of English Literature. 6th ed. General ed. M. H. Abrams. Vol. 2. New York: Norton, 1993.

Norton Anthology of English Literature. 7th ed. General eds. M. H. Abrams & Stephen Greenblatt. Vol. 2. New York: Norton, 2000.

Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces: The Expanded Edi- tion. General ed. Maynard Mack. Vol. 1. New York: Norton, 1995.

William Atkinson is Professor of English at Appalachian State University, where he teaches world literature and twentieth-century British literature. He has published recently on Joseph Conrad, Tanizaki Junichiro, and Katherine Mansfield.




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The Perils of World Literature (2006)