Debating World Literature (review)

Comparatists interested in issues involving world literature will recognize Christopher Prendergast as Mary Ann Caws's associate in putting together the Harper-Collins World Reader (1994). This ambitious, wide-ranging editorial project represented one of the first attempts at giving a truly global scope to world-literature anthologies in the United States, which at that time were almost exclusively Western in emphasis. Prendergast, who was then affiliated with the City University of New York, has now moved to Cambridge University; and this collection of fifteen essays, ten of which have previously appeared elsewhere, reflects that itinerary. No fewer than six come from scholars at Cambridge, four more from New York and its environs, and two others from London, leaving two essays from Denmark and one by Stanford's Franco Moretti as improbably "exotic" additions.

Possible doubts about a narrowly North Atlantic and Anglo-American agenda, however, are quickly dispelled by the book's broad range of topics. Taking its origin in Prendergast's divided response to Pascale Casanova's La République mondiale des lettres (1999), which he admires for its scope but which he contends defined world literature too exclusively in terms of national literatures competing for dominance in a global market, Debating World Literature avoids any single overarching thesis. Unlike David Damrosch, whose What Is World Literature? proposed the criterion of "works that circulate well in translation," or Sarah Lawall, who recommends attending to the acknowledged masterpieces from other cultures while recognizing that one's own culture must have some priority, Prendergast believes that world literature still has the same status that it had for Goethe: it remains a concept "open to indefinitely extended reflection and debate" (viii). In this spirit the essays in Debating World Literature seek to critique at least four assumptions of varying orders of magnitude that have guided thinking on this subject.

The most basic critique centers on the concept of literature itself. Reminding us in his own essay that the original republic of letters featured writing that would not qualify as literary today, Prendergast follows up with Stefan Hoesel-Uhlig's discussion of the distinctly non-belle-lettristic view of literature behind Goethe's famous coinage. Variations on this theme continue with Moretti's comparatist manifesto, "Conjectures on World Literature," with its iconoclastic call for a "second-hand" scholarship (151) that, instead of pursuing the hopeless goal of reading the world's literatures, would limit itself to synthesizing the conclusions of specialists from disparate locales and regions. Only by avoiding a traditional immersion in specific works might students of world literature come to learn the true nature of a field whose basic procedures still need to be established. Equally provocative is Simon Goldhill's "Literary History without Literature," whose case studies of Greek, Roman, and early Christian antiquity bring out their widely varying practices of "language production and consumption." He thereby suggests "the destructive poverty of the category of 'literature' " without even having to leave a familiarly "Western" terrain (196). A similar critique of narrowly literary definitions of verbal art marks Bruce Clunies Ross's "Rhythmical Knots: The World of English Poetry." Ranging from the Caribbean to Australia, from Ireland to the United States, and through England itself (and addressing Indian or Nigerian bilingualism as well), Ross shows how variations in contemporary spoken English undermine the vision of poetry as purely written that was associated with older, imperial doctrines of standard English. Prendergast gives this point its fullest global reach when he acknowledges that "both historically and geographically, the oral vastly exceeds the written" (4). He thereby implies that once the idea of "world" is truly taken seriously, it will require that its companion term "literature" be transformed to mean every kind of artistic expression in words.

A second set of essays takes aim at postcolonial studies, despite Prendergast's recognition of the field's major overlaps with comparative literature. Especially telling is a review essay by Timothy Reiss, the longest item in the volume, which surveys the state of postcolonialism in the early 1990s as represented...