The Location of World Literature

In the last ten years or so since the publication of David Damrosch's groundbreaking book What Is World Literature? (2003), one has come to recognize the need to begin to locate the various facets of the currently prevalent Anglo-Saxon discourse of world literature with more conceptual rigour. The first imperative, it seems to me, is to pose the question: where is "world literature" ontologically?² Some believe it to be an attestable network of texts that, aided especially by the process of globalization, enter into myriad relations—however complex and mediated, but still ultimately demonstrable—that reveal (or sometimes conceal) the hard facts of canon formation, cultural propaganda, ideological indoctrination, the book trade, etc. Others understand world literature above all as a prism through which to analyze literature, a "mode of reading." Sometimes these two beliefs coexist in the same body of work, making it prone to conceptual confusion. A third option, often coexisting with the other two, is to practice "world literature" as an intellectual discourse with clear ideological subtexts, frequently liberal and cosmopolitan. How we actually understand "world literature," as an attestable reality of texts or as a prism—one might even be tempted to add a "unit"—of comparison, in other words, a "mode of reading," is not a metaphysical issue. It has very real implications for the ways in which we approach questions such as how one should try to narrate the history of world literature. In addition to this fundamental differentiation, I also wish to suggest another, more concrete grid that should assist in this effort of locating world literature as a construct. This grid is essentially chronotopic and consists of several vectors. One needs to be aware of at least four major reference points: time, space, language, and, crucially, what one could term self-reflexivity—how literature itself reflects on, and creates images of, "world literature," thus opening up spaces for interrogation and dissent from the currently prevalent notions of world literature. In what follows, I will address these four points in sections of varying length.

Time

In examining the position of world literature on the axis of time, we are bound to ask the question of whether world literature (as attestable textual reality, as prism, or as intellectual discourse) ought to be conceived (a) as an offspring of globalization and transnationalism, or rather, (b) as having always been there (but, if the latter, again, how do we write its history to account for this? Nikolai Konrad and Franco Moretti could both serve as examples to focus on), or (c)—a third option-as a pre-modern phenomenon that dwindles away with the arrival of the nation state and national cultures (see Posnett; Mihály Babits; and, to some extent, also Antal Szerb). Scenarios (b) and (c) are especially important, as they present an alternative to the prevalent view of world literature as being pegged to globalization and transnationalism, and to recent cognate discourses of cosmopolitanism shaped by developments in political philosophy and the social sciences, which tend to see world literature, uncritically, as a facilitator of cosmopolitan attitudes. These two scenarios thus dissent from the dominant Anglo-Saxon discourse of world literature that highlights its dependence on globalization and transnational developments.

Let me dwell on these two dissenting scenarios in closer detail. A key representative of the first one—according to which, world literature, rather than being an offspring of globalization, has always existed—is Franco Moretti, whose work is well known and does not need further elucidation here. Moretti believes that the eighteenth century was a line of demarcation in the history of world literature, for it was then that an international book market began to accelerate the travel of texts and norms of innovation. The difference between these two stages—pre- and post-eighteenth-century—is so unbridgeable that Moretti reaches for two different methodological toolkits to explore these stages. The first employs evolutionary biology and relies on a key text from the early 1940s; he reflects upon the second with the help of Immanuel Wallerstein's world-systems theory. (This is not the place to discuss...