Introduction: The Rise of the World Author from the Death of World Literature

What is a “world author,” and where can we find one within the various methodological approaches that underpin the academic study of “world literature”?¹ In these pages, and by way of an introduction to the essays on “world authorship and German literature” that follow, I reflect on what some of the most basic terms underpinning any study of literature and its significance - script, text, author, world - might mean in the context of ongoing globalizing trends and changing notions of value and political and ethical accountability in the literary marketplace. These general thoughts are channelled through a specific focus on German literature and how it fares within these frames. To focus on just one linguistically and nationally defined literature in a discussion about world literature can be justified in general terms with reference to Edward Said’s and Timothy Brennan’s basic points about the situatedness of literary practices in local contexts. Beyond this, however, German-speaking Europe presents an interesting shift within the history of world literature as both an academic area of enquiry and a publishing phenomenon. On the one hand, individual German thinkers have been crucial to the literary, philosophical, and economic development of the very term Weltliteratur.² On the other, trends within German literature of the late twentieth century rendered it an increasingly unattractive global commodity in the eyes of publishing conglomerates, as well as resistant in other ways to wider media appropriation (A. Williams, Parkes, and Preece, German Language Literature; Literature, Markets and Media). This historic centrality of German-language culture to conceptions of world literature, coupled with the recent threat of marginality to which the German literary industry has had to respond, makes the study of the circulation of German literature into a particularly interesting testing ground for contemporary ideas about human agency in the Western-led literary industry.

My key question, then, is this: when literature itself is already an inherently relative category that reflects individual idiosyncrasies within a small, localized frame (Jefferson; Tihanov, “Cosmopolitanism”), how can we even begin to set about conceptualizing the role of specific cultural agents and the industry processes they represent on a global scale? Underpinning my question is a premise, and this premise draws directly on what the essays in this volume collectively indicate: if we want to understand anything about world literature as a meaningful, socially grounded phenomenon, then we need to find some means of conceptualizing the real-world activities of its human agents: the authors, publishers, editors, reviewers, prize juries, readers, critics, academics, and so on who perpetuate the basic global processes of textual circulation. Although previous sociologists of literature initiated important work in this direction - Raymond Williams, Pierre Bourdieu, and, in the German context, Alexander Kluge and Oskar Negt -the models they developed either apply primarily to individual cultural contexts (Bourdieu) or offer a sweeping overview that has not been sufficiently tied to concrete examples within world literary systems to gain wider currency. Looking to the transcultural, global frame, more recent scholars of world literature have subsequently tended to lose sight of the practical, human focus of these earlier models amid their own primarily theoretical discussions of the translation and circulation of values and hierarchies.

David Damrosch, Pascale Casanova, and Emily Apter, for example, have each outlined the broad-based literary and sociological processes underlying the global circulation of literature. Currently deemed major discourse shapers within the field of world literature, their studies consider how literary texts and the ideas within them travel across cultures in accordance with variously conditioned hierarchies of cultural value and language use. The major strength of Casanova’s and Apter’s work in particular is the extent to which they do recognize world literature as a situated political phenomenon, the aesthetic appreciation of which cannot be divorced from the practical circumstances of its manifestation. Damrosch, meanwhile, argues against “presentism” when considering the contemporary manifestation of world literature and makes important points about how both past texts and texts from little-known cultures can and should be “carried across” into contemporary understandings of literature’s global significance. In all three...