Writing the Dialectical Structure of the Modern Subject: Goethe on World Literature and World Citizenship

Given the singular lack of clarity of the term Weltliteratur, it is remarkable that Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s (or Christoph Martin Wieland’s) neologism continues to be treated as a concept with explanatory force. It is probably safe to say that it is the one idea of Goethe’s that has proven most popular outside Germany and outside German studies. But what exactly did Goethe intend with this term? Why does he couch his ideas in a compound that places the vague notion of literature alongside the vague notion of world? If he wants to offer a solution to a perceived crisis in the national literatures of Europe (as his letters of 1827-31 seem to imply), then what is it about the concept “world” that might point to a solution? And if the crisis lies in perceptions of the world, why turn to literature for an answer?

Goethe’s scanty notes and conversational references can hardly answer these, the simplest of the questions arising from his compound. Instead of a theory of Weltliteratur, Goethe sketched what Martin Bollacher refers to as “das tragende Gerüst eines in der Gegenwart gegründeten und in der Zukunft zu vollendenden Theoriegebäudes” (170). This certainly constitutes part of the continuing fascination of his ideas. But there is something else that keeps it alive and debated today, and that is a perceived affinity to the phenomenon of rampant globalization, which appears to place national cultures in the shadow of increasingly homogenized forms of expression. This has prompted Emily Apter to use it as shorthand for the progressive homogenization of world cultures in globalization. “I do harbor serious reservations about tendencies in ‘world’ Literature toward reflexive endorsement of cultural equivalence and substitutability, or toward the celebration of nationally and ethnically branded ‘differences’ that have been niche-marketed as commercialized ‘identities’” (2). In a similar vein, Herbert Uerlings understands Goethe’s conception of Weltliteratur in the sense of “eines durch Literatur gestifteten Kummunikationszusammenhangs. So verstanden gilt: Weltliteratur ist eine Form der kulturellen Globalisierung” (35). Goethe received this sentiment in its most powerful form from the young Herder during the short period of their intense friendship in Strasbourg. This was the time when Herder had begun thinking about what it means to speak of a common humanity in a world of diverse cultures and languages. Goethe was interested in an alternative investigation into the question of difference and common humanity, leading to a lifelong inquiry into the Leibnizian balance between universal forces at work in the world and their manifestation in individual human lives. Given the centrality of the concept of Welt in Leibniz’s formulation of this balance, it is no surprise that Goethe would continually frame the Leibnizian balance in relation to this concept - not least in his writings on Weltliteratur. Furthermore, the manifestation of universal forces in individual lives was widely understood by the Storm and Stress movement to be a question of artistic production and of genius (see Boyle 156-57). Goethe adopted this in his early work, but even after he abandoned Storm and Stress, questions of individual authorship were never far removed from questions of universal principles at work in artistic production -questions of world authorship.

What interests me about Goethe’s conjunction of Welt and Literatur in the context of world authorship are his persistent attempts to understand the writing subject as dwelling at the interface of local and global phenomena. In this essay, I will show that the concept of Weltliteratur arose out of Goethe’s continued engagement in the mid-1820s with a fundamental epistemological and aesthetic concern that had not left him since his days in Strasbourg: How is it possible to conceive of human life as a universal but to do so in a way that will not be swept up in the globalizing movements he found so threatening (as documented by, among others, Michael Jaeger)? I will be arguing that, by bringing Goethe’s feelings about globalization to the discussion of Weltliteratur, the idea of literature is weighted in favour of literary...