Commentary: Literary History in a Global Age

No consensus dominates current thinking toward literary history in our global age, to judge from the remarkable assemblage gathered here. Some contributions are wonderfully erudite, others probe the lacunae in what we as yet know or can think, but all are open essays, trying out live directions for further development. Some exemplify by their performance models of a newly global literary history, and some imagine plans for organizing collaborative projects that encompass more of the world than any single scholar can command. Yet others think through the changes that may be required for the genre of literary historiography to comprehend the world that we are striving to know.

In “Toward Interpretive Pluralism: Literary History and the History of Reading,” Brian Stock masterfully reconsiders his long career’s work on the history of reading, while reaching forward to new collaborations with brain scientists. I am especially intrigued by the maneuvers through which he puts “universalism.” From its position in classical philosophy of life, in a Gibbonian turn it is replaced by religion, over the centuries in which Christianity and Islam reshape the world. Within the West, the Latin language establishes a new basis for universalism, which then yields to the printing press. Marshall McLuhan still has much to offer.

Fredric Jameson, in “New Literary History after the End of the New,” combines stringent analysis with bold speculation. Reflecting on the benefit of making stark, difficult decisions concerning construction in literary history, he introduces the problematic contrast of “end” to “new” that several other contributors develop and that will help to guide my own reflections as this response proceeds.

Walter F. Veit, in “Globalization and Literary History, or Rethinking Comparative Literary History—Globally,” and Anders Pettersson, in “Transcultural Literary History: Beyond Constricting Notions of World Literature,” both discuss important examples of world or transnational literary history that are likely to have escaped most American scholars, either because of their language (Swedish, Russian, Dutch) or their subject matter (Central Europe, Africa, Latin America). Veit’s compelling phrase, “diasporic multilingual literatures” (427), establishes a category for thought that I imagine will extend productively beyond his own work on Australia. Pettersson emphasizes the “freedom” required for literary scholarship—enough of what we “must” do! He leaves a question that some other contributors take up: What can we use our freedom for? What motivates our writing literary history?¹

In “Toward a History of World Literature,” David Damrosch directly asks why anyone would want to read a large-scale literary history. In suggesting that the fundamental purpose of such work is to gain an “overview,” he reaches a familiar, troubling problem: can literary history permit close analysis? The trouble becomes greater the more global, or full-world, the history becomes. He moves toward resolving that problem by proposing a “Wikipedia model”: a survey containing hyperlinks to permit more detailed investigation. Amy J. Elias offers a similar solution in “Interactive Cosmopolitanism and Collaborative Technologies: New Foundations for Global Literary History,” but for a different problem. Her solution arises not from the compositional exigencies of historiography, but from a politics of discourse seeking to escape the “monologic and top-down” (705) structure of ordinary academic writing.

Nadia Al-Bagdadi’s “Registers of Arabic Literary History” elucidates an astonishing density of information from the history of scholarship, no less than from the primary materials of Arab writing, from over 1,300 years. She demonstrates the precocious exemplarity of Arab culture as global, or at least massively transnational, especially in the literatures of Abbasid Baghdad and of al-Andalus, cases that must figure importantly in any full theorization or typology that acknowledges that our current situation is not the only one that counts.

In characterizing “Untranslatables: A World System,” Emily Apter highlights a topic that threads through the various papers. For Damrosch, as far back as Gilgamesh, translation is the crucial step in a work’s entering “world” literature, and for Pascale Casanova, “Translation is the major prize and weapon in international literary competition.”² Apter focuses on untranslatability, showing the fascination of Barbara Cassin’s collaborative “dictionary of untranslatables,” still too little known, I find...