Transcultural Literary History: Beyond Constricting Notions of World Literature

I

Literary-history writing has very often stopped at national or cultural borders: it has been French literary history, or Western, or Arabic, or Chinese literary history. There is nothing wrong with that, but transcending such boundaries is certainly possible and sometimes important.

By “transcultural literary history,” I mean literary history with no predetermined national or temporal limitations.¹ This is a vast field, and it allows for investigations of very many kinds. What I wish to emphasize and defend in this essay is, primarily, the very openness of the field. In my view, many different foci, research agendas, and methods are justified in the transcultural study of literary history. We should expect research in the area to pose significant questions and to pursue these in an enlightening manner. That aside, however, we should be wary of all general declarations of what transcultural literary studies “must” be or “cannot” be.

One’s own research interests will largely determine what literary-historical questions one finds significant. I will begin by explaining what aspects of transcultural literary history I myself have been occupied with and why, and then point to a number of other types of transcultural literary studies following entirely different paths. This is the positive part of my essay: an affirmation of the breadth and interest of transcultural literary history.

What I call transcultural literary history has often been referred to in terms of world literature and the study of world literature. There is, however, a tendency, which has been rather pronounced over the last decade, to portray the study of world literature, or what I call the study of transcultural literary history, as something much narrower, in scope or in method, than I have indicated above. The second half of the essay is a reflection on the concept of world literature and, not least, a critical discussion of some recent arguments about it; that is the negative part of the essay and the explanation for its subtitle.

II

The Swedish academic subject within which I am working, litteraturvetenskap,² is in principle supposed to comprise both the history and theory of literature in their entirety, but this is not what it is like in practice. There are no separate chairs in Swedish literature in Sweden, so all study of Swedish literature is incorporated into litteraturvetenskap, where it plays a very dominant role. When presenting my academic subject in English-speaking contexts, I call it “Swedish and Comparative Literature.” My real academic specialty, however, is something I call “fundamental literary theory.” For me, the fundamental theoretical questions about literature concern what literature is, how literature functions (linguistically, psychologically, socially), and wherein the value of literature consists.³

I have long found pleasure in reading literature from different ages and cultures, finding it an antidote against cultural claustrophobia, but my research interests in transcultural literary history, if one can call them that, were sparked by a definition of “literature” that I constructed in the late 1980s.⁴ This was a definition of the term as it is used in the West about modern times—as is well known, the term’s reference is much wider where earlier periods are concerned. Nevertheless, I could not help wondering how the definition would apply to other times and to non-Western cultures, and how the pragmatically distinct use of language to which the definition made reference could be traced in older texts. In pursuing such questions, I gradually arrived at a way of thinking about types of literary culture and about the place of what we call literature in these cultures. Put very briefly, it is this.⁵

Oral cultures usually display a number of genres that we customarily call literary: songs and narratives of various kinds—entertaining, practical, mythical, magical, or religious, often at one and the same time.⁶ They do not, however, have a concept of literature.

In literate cultures, genres multiply with time. Religious, administrative, and economic texts of many kinds are created; some of them are viewed by the culture itself as part of its central heritage. Texts that might be characterized as philosophical...