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  • Commentary: “With no particular place to go”: Literary History in the Age of the Global Picture1
  • Hayden White (bio)

[C]riminal organizations, cannily mirroring the practices of their legitimate counterparts, have exploited economies of scale, developed worldwide partnerships, and cultivated new markets. As a result, bank fraud, human trafficking, protection rackets, narcotics smuggling, state-sanctioned embezzlement, assassinations, and even old-fashioned political corruption are practiced today on a scale previously unimaginable.

—Review of McMafia by Misha Glenny, New Yorker, June 23, 2008, 83

The papers gathered here offer a wide range of views on the topic “literary history in the global age.” They range from Karyn Ball’s disturbing discussion of the dark side of global technology to Anders Pettersson’s cool report on the current state of world literary studies. Many of the essays presume an important difference between “world” literature and “global” literature. A couple, those of Mark Poster and Amy Elias, for example, suggest that once literature enters into the global condition, it undergoes changes of substance that make it hardly recognizable as either “writing” or “book.” Other essays, by Emily Apter, Rey Chow, and Nirvana Tanoukhi, take on the issue of “translatability” from national and international to “global” literary markets and problems of “translation” from the analog media of modernity to the digitalized media of postmodernity. Elias and Ball ask whether the changes in world culture caused by globalization may not require a change in the way we view history itself. Fredric Jameson addresses this issue in his critique of globalism as an inherently antihistorical ideology and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht raises the question of whether we need or why should we want a “history of literature” after we have ceased to believe in history as a source of usable knowledge at all.

The histories of the history of literature adumbrated by Brian Stock, Anders Pettersson, Jerome McGann, and Walter Veit add up to a good account of the relation between literary criticism and history of literature [End Page 727] from the Renaissance to modernism. Taken together, they show why literary history or history of literature remains important for scholars of literature and, at the same time, seems to be regarded with suspicion by literary critics whose interests are primarily aesthetical and custodial of the value of this form of the high art of the West. On the view of literary history offered here, however, there is not much to discuss. Literary history has its uses; the new technologies that have made the global world possible pose a threat to literature and indeed art in general as we in the West have known it, but in itself literary history would not seem to offer anything substantial for determining where we stand with the history of literature in the global age.

The essays by David Bleich, Poster, Jameson, and Gumbrecht place the practice of both literary criticism and literary history within the context of the global and indicate the difficulties that the very notion of “literature” must face in making the transition from a merely “international” and analog to a “transnational” and digitalized economic and cultural matrix. As for the once modern (Stock, Pettersson) but now venerable (Veit and McGann) “literary history,” Gumbrecht thinks that its day has passed (along with the traditional idea of “history” itself) and that it can be made to contribute to the understanding of what has happened to modern Western culture only if it undergoes a total remaking.

Poster usefully identifies the new (digitalized) means of production that determine a remaking of the modes of cultural production, and that do not so much change what we mean by “literature” but relocate it in a post-aesthetic space presupposing a different arrangement of the human sensorium. In this space of internet and satellite images that are not so much reproductions (analogues) of a more real, material nature, the epistemological valence of what used to be called “experience” is radically altered. What will pass for “knowledge” will have both a new form and a new content, or rather a mode of existence in which content is indistinguishable from form.

The philosopher Frank Ankersmit is fond of defining the art work as an artifact whose...

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