Studying Transcultural Literary History (review)

This collection of thirty-three essays by renowned comparatist scholars engages with the theoretical methodology, feasibility, and desirability of transcultural literary history and was originally presented as individual papers at the symposium, “Studying Transcultural Literary History,” that took place November 4–6, 2004, in Stockholm. The conference was part of the Swedish project “Literature and Literary History in Global Contexts” that ran from 1996 to 2004. The results of the ambitious project, the four-volume collection of essays, Literary History: Towards a Global Perspective, was published in 2006. The contributions of the present volume “sets the stage” (5) for the aforementioned compilation. The essays are grouped in six different sections that focus on challenges of transcultural literary history: “Possibilities for Transcultural Literary History,” “Delimiting the Objects of Literary History,” “Rethinking World Literature,” “The Practice of Writing Transnational Literary History,” “Literature in Circulation,” and “Translating Cultures and Literatures,” with introductions by Anders Pettersson, Tord Olsson, Stefan Helgesson, Margareta Petersson, Gunilla Lindberg-Wada, and Bo Utas, respectively.

Despite the awareness, as Pettersson states, that “[t]he idea of comprehensive literary-historical surveys” can be viewed as problematic or as “a variety of grand narratives” (9), the present volume emerged out of the conviction that “[t]he study of literature is not intrinsically limited by time, culture or national boundaries” and that this premise makes possible “studies that are diachronic and/or include more than one culture” (3). In the context of globalization, the anthology equally grows out of the desire to engage with “limitations in terms of the languages” that comparative literature has traditionally engaged with, and the restrictive way in which the discipline has constructed “‘the literary’ as such” (3). As a matter of fact, conscious that inadequate “Western perspective and modern Western notions, such as literature” have prevailed in the study of dissimilar literary cultures and histories, this volume sees in transcultural literary history the potential to renovate comparative literature “as a way of engaging responsibly with cultural difference in a wide—or even global—temporal and spatial frame” (3). Along these lines, the participants in this project continue to intervene in the debate about the future of comparative literature and the viability or desirability of transcultural literary histories, areas that critics such as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Susan Bassnett, Linda Hutcheon, and Mario Valdés have pioneered. Unfortunately, due to the large number of essays compiled in this anthology and the restrictions of space, I am not able to comment on each of them. Though this anthology contains articles by leading scholars that range from contemporary Yorùbá and South African praise poetry, to the problems of mapping Japanese “literature,” to the difficult cross-cultural transfer between the modern Western civilization and the Arab renaissance, I am obliged to engage exclusively with the contributions that are immediately related to my fields of research.

In “Possibilities for Transcultural Literary History,” Leon de Kock, Harish Trivedi, Djelal Kadir, Vera Nünning, and Zhang Longxi examine the theoretical possibilities and perils of comprehensive world histories of literatures. In his essay, Koch reports about fruitless efforts by scholars of South African literature to assemble a linear encyclopedia of South African literature. However, Koch illustrates that, in striving to overcome the restrictive paradigm, the scholars reverted to “the open-ended spaces of hypertext” (20) to generate a model that at least “theoretically” might handle “the linguistic disparateness, the incommensurability of forms, the blinding diversity of topics and the supplement of data perceived” in the field of South African literature (20). Despite the unsuccessful hypertext encyclopedia, Koch nonetheless recommends “hypertext as a metaphor” and “as a model for transcultural literary history” (21; original emphasis).

Harish Trivedi examines several attempts to write a literary history of India from a Western perspective. Regrettably this approach, as Trivedi illustrates, has traditionally assumed that “what is not documentable did not exist” and many scholars have thus forgotten or discarded oral transmissions and traditions from their surveys (25). Additionally, at a time when “ninety-one percent of...