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The global process of thinking global literature: from Marx’s Weltliteratur to Sarkozy’s littérature-monde

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 October 2019

Jernej Habjan
Jernej Habjan*
Affiliation:
Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Novi trg 2, 1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia
*
Corresponding author. E-mail: jhabjan@zrc-sazu.si
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Abstract

This article outlines the history of research in global literature as a history that is itself global. This kind of global history of the theorization of global literature demands a departure from the existing accounts and their nascent gap between heated theoreticist debates and pacifying historicist anthologies. A global approach to the problematic can bridge this gap because it considers not only what the most influential studies on global literature say, but also where and when they say it. Whether these be Romantic assertions of world literature, post-war pleas for cosmopolitan literature, Cold War polemics about ‘Third World’ literature, or millennial theories of transnational, post-national, planetary, and, indeed, global literature, the article considers not only the object of these studies but also the studies themselves as an object; not only the text but also the context. Hence, a historicization of literary theories of globalization in effect bleeds into a historicization of globalization itself.

Keywords

global literatureglobalizationliterary studiesthe globalworld literature
Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Global History , Volume 14 , Special Issue 3: Historicizing the global: an interdisciplinary perspective , November 2019 , pp. 395 - 412
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2019 

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Footnotes

†

This article was written at the Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts in the framework of the research project ‘May ’68 in literature and theory: the last season of modernism in France, Slovenia, and the world’ (J6-9384) and the research programme ‘Studies in literary history, literary theory and methodology’ (P6-0024), both of which were financed by the Slovenian Research Agency.

References

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14 Quoted in Strich, Fritz, Goethe and world literature, trans. Sym, C. A. M., London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1949, p. 350 Google Scholar.

15 Ibid. , p. 351.

16 See Etiemble, René, Essais de littérature (vraiment) générale, Paris: Gallimard, 1975, p. 13 Google Scholar.

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19 See, respectively, Moretti, Franco, Distant reading, London: Verso, 2013, p. 122, and Apter, Against world literature, pp. 54–6.Google Scholar

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22 Apter, Against world literature, p. 3.

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24 Apter, Against world literature, p. 3.

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28 Rabindranath Tagore, ‘Visva Sahitya’, pp. 285–6.

29 Ibid., p. 286.

30 Arrighi, Giovanni, Hopkins, Terence K., and Wallerstein, Immanuel, ‘1968: the great rehearsal’, in Boswell, Terry, ed., Revolution in the world-system, New York: Greenwood Press, 1989, p. 19 Google Scholar.

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32 Marx, Karl and Engels, Frederick, The communist manifesto, trans. Moore, Samuel, London: Verso, 1998, p. 39 Google Scholar.

33 Romain Lecler also cites Marx and Engels’ paragraph in this issue, suggesting no less than a profound analogy between it and some of the key definitions of the current stage of globalization. See Romain Lecler, ‘What makes globalization really new? Sociological views on our current globalization’, p. 358.

34 Scherr, Johannes, Bildersaal der Weltliteratur: dritte, neu bearbeitete und stark vermehrte Auflage: erster Band, Stuttgart: Kröner, 1885, p. 5 Google Scholar (my translation).

35 Scherr, Johannes, Bildersaal der Weltliteratur: zweite, umgearbeitete, vervollständigte und bis zur Gegenwart fortgeführte Auflage: erster Band, Stuttgart: Kröner, 1869, p. 5 Google Scholar (my translation).

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37 Hugo Meltzl, ‘Present tasks of comparative literature (1877)’, trans. Hans-Joachim Schulz and Phillip H. Rhein, in Damrosch, Melas, and Buthelezi, Princeton sourcebook, p. 46.

38 Maxim Gorky, ‘World’s literature’, in Katalog izdatel’stva ‘Vsemirnaya literatura’ pri Narodnom komissariate po prosveshcheniyu: vstupitel’naya stat’ya M. Gor’kogo / Catalogue des éditions de la ‘Littérature mondiale’ paraissant sous le patronnage du Commissariat de l’instruction publique: préface de M. Gorky, St Petersburg: Vsemirnaya literatura, 1919, pp. 21–2 (English translation in original publication).

39 Zheng Zhenduo, ‘A view on the unification of literature (1922)’, trans. Guangchen Chen, in Damrosch, World literature in theory, pp. 58–67.

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41 Strich, Goethe and world literature, p. vii.

42 Ibid. , p. viii.

43 Ibid. , pp. viii–ix.

44 Strich, Fritz, Goethe und die Weltliteratur, Bern: Francke Verlag, 1957, p. 9 Google Scholar (my translation).

45 Auerbach, Erich, ‘Philology and Weltliteratur ’, trans. Maire, and Said, Edward, Centennial Review, 13, 1, 1969, p. 3 Google Scholar.

46 Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel notes in this issue how, in Auerbach’s time, his kind of understanding of Weltliteratur found a way both into North American literary departments and into French state policies of art history. See Joyeux-Prunel, ‘Art history and the global’.

47 Bloom, Harold, The Western canon: the books and school of the ages, New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1994, p. 203 Google Scholar.

48 See Arrighi, Hopkins, and Wallerstein, ‘1968: the great rehearsal’, pp. 19–30; and Arrighi, Giovanni, Hopkins, Terence K., and Wallerstein, Immanuel, ‘1989, the continuation of 1968’, Review (Fernand Braudel Center), 15, 2, 1992, pp. 221–42Google Scholar.

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50 Etiemble, Essais de littérature (vraiment) générale, p. 13 (my translation).

51 Ibid. , p. 10.

52 Etiemble, René, ‘Faut-il réviser la notion de Weltliteratur?’, in Jost, François, ed., Actes du IVe Congrès de l’Association internationale de la littérature comparée / Proceedings of the IVth Congress of the International Comparative Literature Association, 2 vols., The Hague: Mouton, 1966, vol. 1, p. 5–16 Google Scholar; for the English translation, see Etiemble, ‘Do we have to revise?’, pp. 93–103.

53 See Wallerstein, ‘Structural crises’, p. 135.

54 Arrighi, Hopkins, and Wallerstein, ‘1989, the continuation of 1968’, p. 221.

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56 Ibid.

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62 See Ďurišin, Dionýz, Čo je svetová literatúra?, Bratislava: Obzor, 1992Google Scholar; see also Ďurišin, Dionýz, ‘World literature as a target literary-historical category’, Slovak Review, 2, 1, 1993, pp. 7–15 Google Scholar.

63 Quoted in Etiemble, ‘Do we have to revise?’, p. 94.

64 D’haen, Routledge concise history of world literature, p. 68. For the impact of 9/11 on the methodological globalization of art history, see Joyeux-Prunel in this issue, ‘Art history and the global’.

65 Moretti, Distant reading, p. 43.

66 For an extreme example of how a single academic unit can impact an entire scholarly discipline, see, in this issue, Katja Naumann’s discussion of the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago in ‘Long-term and decentred trajectories of doing history from a global perspective: institutionalization, post-colonial critique, and empiricist approaches, before and after the 1970s’.

67 Akeel Bilgrami, ‘Foreword’, in Said, Humanism and democratic criticism, p. ix.

68 Said, Humanism and democratic criticism, p. 7.

69 Ibid. , p. xvi.

70 Casanova, World republic of letters, p. 351.

71 Moretti, Distant reading, p. 43.

72 Franco Moretti, ‘Conjectures on world literature’, New Left Review, 1, 2000, pp. 55, 57, emphasis in original.

73 Ibid. , p. 57.

74 Moretti, ‘More conjectures’, p. 81.

75 See Spivak, Death of a discipline, pp. 107–9, n. 1.

76 Ibid. , p. xii.

77 Ibid. , p. 84.

78 Eric Hayot, ‘World literature and globalization’, in D’haen, Damrosch, and Kadir, Routledge companion to world literature, p. 226.

79 Damrosch, What is world literature?, p. 299, emphasis in original.

80 Beecroft, ‘World literature without a hyphen’, pp. 87–91.

81 Ibid. , p. 98.

82 Besides Beecroft and Hayot, see especially Cheah, What is a world?, pp. 31–7; Ganguly, This thing called the world, pp. 22, 78; Mufti, Forget English!, pp. 32–4; and Warwick Research Collective, Combined and uneven development, pp. 6–10.

83 Hayot, ‘World literature and globalization’, p. 225.

84 Ibid. , p. 226.

85 See Gupta, Suman, Globalization and literature, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009, pp. 142–5; and Juvan, Marko, Literary studies in reconstruction: an introduction to literature, Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2011, pp. 73–86 Google Scholar.

86 Damrosch, What is world literature?, pp. 4–6, 281.

87 Warwick Research Collective, Combined and uneven development, pp. 2–3.

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89 See, for instance, Melissa Dinsman, ‘The digital in the humanities: an interview with Franco Moretti’, Los Angeles Review of Books, 2 March 2016, https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-digital-in-the-humanities-an-interview-with-franco-moretti/ (consulted 4 April 2018); and Arno Widmann, ‘Vom Lesen ohne zu lesen: Interview Franco Moretti’, Frankfurter Rundschau, 5 February 2015, https://www.fr.de/kultur/literatur/lesen-ohne-lesen-11688754.html (consulted 27 June 2019).

90 Apter, Against world literature, pp. 45–56.

91 See, respectively, Apter, ‘Global translatio, pp. 255–6, 280–1; Apter, ‘Untranslatables’, pp. 590–7; and Apter, Against world literature, pp. 52–6.

92 Apter, Against world literature, p. 18.

93 ‘Toward a “world-literature” in French’, trans. Daniel Simon, World literature today, 83, 2, 2009, pp. 54, 56.

94 Le Bris, Michel and Rouaud, Jean, eds., Pour une littérature-monde, Paris: Gallimard, 2007.Google Scholar

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96 Ibid. , p. 277.

97 David Damrosch, introduction to Sarkozy, ‘For a living and popular francophonie’, in Damrosch, World literature in theory, p. 276.

98 D’haen, Domínguez, and Thomsen, ‘Introduction’, p. xi, emphasis in original.

99 Foucault, Michel, ‘What is Enlightenment?’, trans. Porter, Catherine, in Foucault, The Foucault reader, ed. Rabinow, Paul, trans. Bouchard, Donald F. et al., New York: Pantheon Books, 1984, pp. 37–9Google Scholar.

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