World Literature: The Unbearable Lightness of Thinking Globally

Diaspora 12:1 2003 World Literature: The Unbearable Lightness of Thinking Globally1 Gregory Jusdanis The Ohio State University 1. Does literature have anything interesting to say about globalization ? Is the work of literary critics germane to those analyzing today’s transnational flows of people, ideas, and goods? Many students of globalization, who work primarily in economics, political science, cultural studies, and journalism, would be skeptical of the claim that literary study could address their concerns. Indeed, they would be surprised to learn that Comparative Literature has been championing cosmopolitanism for more than a century, or that it had developed an international perspective on literary relations decades before they had. Comparative Literature, in fact, prefigured today’s transnational consciousness through its attempt to transcend the limits of individual national traditions and to investigate links among them. This makes the current malaise of Comparative Literature baffling . A discipline that promoted polyglossia and comparison for 100 years now finds itself in decline. Rather than emerging as a leading light in an academy so preoccupied with interdisciplinarity and difference, Comparative Literature has lost its glow. Most alarming of all, it has allowed English, Cultural Studies, and Globalization Studies to pursue a scorched-earth policy with respect to foreign languages. The discipline that spearheaded transnationalism in the humanities now finds itself in the rear guard. With some justification, Gayatri Spivak speaks of the death of the discipline. Her book, like so many studies of Comparative Literature today, is written in an elegiac tone. So persuaded are critics of Comparative Literature’s demise that they have resurrected the idea of world literature as a way of analyzing global literary production. To be sure, the proliferation of courses in and anthologies and studies of world literature all seems to indicate the rise of a fresh, more up-to-date approach to the study of the literatures of the globe. But is world literature really that novel? Or is it a case of old software in new computers? Has it learned from the lessons xxxxxxxxxxxx 103 Diaspora 12:1 2003 of Comparative Literature, the discipline it seeks to replace, or is it destined to repeat its errors? In order to address these questions, I need to consider briefly and at the outset the ideology and history of Comparative Literature. At the very heart of Comparative Literature is the promotion of the comparison of various traditions, close reading of texts, polyglossia, and ecumenicity. Indeed, if one looks at the texts inaugurating the discipline, one finds two justifications for the new project: the desire to understand the connections between literary traditions in the original languages and a defense of cosmopolitanism.2 While these may seem self-evident truths today, a sign no doubt of the successful consolidation of the discipline’s central message, they were not so in the nineteenth century, which witnessed the rise of the various national literatures in Europe as objects of disciplinary study. Early comparatists responded to the compartmentalization of Enlightenment letters by seeking links among these traditions.3 In what is perhaps the first presentation of comparative literature in the United States, Charles Chauncey Shackford wrote that all “great poems” are “structurally and vitally related” (42). The task of Comparative Literature was to trace the analogies between traditions and identify the peculiarities of each (48). Joseph Texte, a French critic and pioneer of the discipline, contended that, since European literature had borrowed from the “ancient literatures of the Orient, of Greece, and of Rome,” it was imperative for the “historian of modern literatures” to study “their mutual relationship” (110). The comparative study of literature is necessary, Louis Paul Betz insisted, because no national literature had emerged on its own (148). A half-century later, René Wellek reaffirmed this position, namely, that the “great argument for ‘comparative literature’ is the obvious falsity of the idea of a self-enclosed national literature” (“The Concept” 5). Not satisfied to look for affinities between literatures, these critics often discovered totalities, at least in Europe. In an influential text tellingly titled “La littérature européenne,” the great French critic Ferdinand Brunetière spoke of a “European literature” that subsumed all the national literatures into one category (1–5, 49...