Planetary Literary History: The Place of the Text

Franco Moretti has recently dramatized the difficult relation between literary history and reading at the present moment, in the process renewing all of our justified anxieties about exactly what we can say about “literature.” Although Goethe called for the advent of “the age of world literature” in 1827 and Marx and Engels saw a world literature arising “from the many national and local literatures” in 1848, an ever-growing awareness of planetary interconnections in political, economic, and ethical life has lent urgency to the project of thinking in terms of a planetary system of literature.¹ To register the enormity of this task for the readers who would be its foot soldiers, Moretti observes, “we are talking of hundreds of languages and literatures here. Reading ‘more’ seems hardly to be the solution. Especially because we’ve just started rediscovering what Margaret Cohen calls the ‘great unread.’”² So much to read, so little time. Moretti thus holds out before us a project whose immensity impresses us with the comparative triviality of our own individual efforts. A task that might be characterized as Herculean and sublime, genuinely planetary literary history would disrupt the understanding of reading-as-self-cultivation or reading-as-the-mastery-of-national-literatures (packaged in the relatively manageable form of canons). It would look completely unlike the noble calling that Matthew Arnold took reading to be when he urged readers to judge so intensely and repeatedly that they might overcome their chauvinisms and parochialisms, might advance a justification of a national literary academy on the model of the French Academy.

For Moretti, even a lifetime of reading cannot come to terms with a project of such scale. The very perception of planetary literature as a whole that dwarfs individual capacities marks it as sublime and suggests the next stage in his argument—the shift into another mode. Moretti describes what would be a “subreption” in Kant’s terms—a consciousness of our own capacity to think such overwhelming of our individual empirical capacities. In Moretti’s terms, however, this shift from unmanageable and intolerable overabundance to a new and manageable phase occurs less as an account of consciousness than as a methodological response—an opening on social scientific method and its ways of assembling a heuristically unified field from which comparative values can be deduced.

In the discussion that follows, I first try to identify aspects of the tension between writing literary history and reading individual texts as that tension has perennially emerged. Moreover, because I see the writing of literary history and the reading of individual texts as projects that strain against one another—and that have done so at least since the expansion of literary critical and historical discourse in the eighteenth century—I second Moretti’s view that close reading does not forward the aims of literary history. I then turn to the claims that Pascale Casanova and Moretti make for the usefulness of sociological formalism in developing an account of literature in a planetary system, and endorse their sense of its importance in capturing something broader even than circulation figures or reception history—namely, social regard for literature, on the one hand, and the unevenness of its distribution, on the other. Finally, rather than just endorsing Casanova’s repudiation of an atomizing process of reading individual texts and Moretti’s suggestion that we look to units larger than the text (such as genres) and smaller than the text (such as free indirect style), I consider how distant knowledges—properly linked with sociological awareness rather than with the intense direct engagement with a text represented by close reading—might contribute to our understanding of texts considered as units in themselves.

It is perhaps ironic that, in the wake of what was sometimes called the “linguistic turn” in literary studies, and one that we might have thought that we were done with, language would have recently emerged as a crucially complex problem for the writing of literature, literary criticism, and literary history. We know that literature is a selection of language, so we’ve always recognized that language, as they say...