"Love for the World": Shakespeare, National Literature, and Weltliteratur

To become morally independent of one's formative society […] is the grandest theme of all literature, because it is the only means of moral progress, the establishment of some higher ethical concept.

—William Empson, "Volpone" (72)

Weltliteratur and Global Modernity

Earlier conceptualizations of world literature manifest forms of determinism that were prevalent in the nineteenth century, including Goethe's idea of world literature as consequences and effects of the global practice of translation, and Karl Marx's reading of world literature in the context of global capitalism, the significance of which had yet to be fully understood for the emerging international community of literature.¹ However, neither Goethe nor Marx had anything specific to say about world literature. What does it mean to have a world literature? What could it do for us? How should we understand the relationship between world literature and national literature? These are some of the questions Goethe and Marx failed to address.

This essay proposes to revisit Erich Auerbach's seminal essay "Philology and Weltliteratur," published in 1952, and rethink the idea and practice of world literature as a historical process, with reference to cross-cultural appropriations of Shakespeare as means of facilitating the development of national literatures in Germany in the late eighteenth century and in China in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. When Johann Gottfried Herder "discovered" Shakespeare in the 1770s, Germany was at a crucial juncture in the development of a new cultural identity. About a century later, China too was faced with the similar question of how to expedite the birth of a new national literature that was different from its classical counterpart but fully conversant with modern European literature. In both cases, Shakespeare was a crucial force for the encouragement of a cosmopolitan literary outlook. Despite vast differences in the cultural conditions of Germany in the late eighteenth century and China in the late nineteenth century, both seem to have shared the desire for an expression of what Auerbach calls "man unified in his multiplicity" ("Philology" 4). Auerbach's essay is a text originating in the early years after World War II, which were marked by the rapid disintegration of the colonial empires, the expansion of the global system of nation-states with the founding of new nation-states that had achieved full independence in defeating colonialism or internal despotism such as India and China, and the memories of the war, particularly of the Holocaust, in which millions of Jews were slaughtered. In the aftermath of the humanitarian disaster of the war came a renewed urgency to develop a new concept of Weltliteratur that could more adequately respond to the post-war global order.

After World War II, standardization became a universal phenomenon, as Auerbach notes: "The process of imposed uniformity, which originally derived from Europe, continues its work, and hence serves to undermine all individual traditions" ("Philology" 1). In a veiled reference to European imperialism, Auerbach directs attention to the experiential paradox that even though nationalism was on the rise in the world, the world was becoming more standardized: "it is clear to the impartial observer that the inner bases of national existence are decaying [. …] Standardization, in short, dominates everywhere" ("Philology" 2). Today, the globalized world is only an intensified version of the type of "standardization" Auerbach had observed more than half a century ago. It is not possible, for example, to escape from the same kinds of shopping malls, with the same window exhibitions of fashion brands such as Hermes and Chanel, in major international cities such as Shanghai, Shenzhen, Hong Kong, London, and New York. Auerbach thus takes as a starting point the paradox that the defining characteristic of the era of supposed national differentiation turns out to be a sort of levelling out of cultural diversities, and the pressure to replicate and reproduce the same political models and cultural forms everywhere. "Our earth, the domain of Weltliteratur," warns Auerbach, "is growing smaller and losing its diversity" ("Philology" 2), and in response to an increasingly homogenized world, he points out that "Weltliteratur does not merely refer to...