A Portrait of the Artist as a World Author: Framing Authorship in Johannes Scherr’s Bildersaal der Weltliteratur

German literature was on display in the southwestern corner of the great transept in the nave of the Crystal Palace, the magnificent glass edifice containing the global everything of the first World’s Fair in 1851. In the so-called Portrait Gallery of the Great Exhibition at London’s Hyde Park, visitors could gaze at the exhibited busts of the “men who have worked their way to eminence,” the collection of chiselled likenesses representing the “broad brow of the poet whose works we have read, or the martial air of the soldier whose deeds we have heard” (Phillips iii). In the German section, the area of Poets and Dramatists displayed the literature of the Kulturnation as a collection of busts in the following proportions: three parts Goethe, two parts Schiller, one Klopstock, one Lessing, one Wieland, one Tieck, and, as a slight deviation from the otherwise expected canonical figures, one Berthold Auerbach. Listed in Samuel Phillips’s 1854 description of the Portrait Gallery, modern German literature begins, as it so often does, with Klopstock, while the overwhelming majority of attention goes to Goethe, with Schiller a close contender for the central position. The representation of German letters in ten busts invites the obvious criticism that its brevity is achieved by neglecting those absent from the collection. Yet it is also a reminder of the challenge of staging literature as a spectacle of viewership. Walter Benjamin claimed that the birthplace of the novel is the individual in isolation. Following this notion, to curate literature is not simply to present it as something of a whole through representative parts but also to transform the lonely act of reading into a public act of spectatorship in the gallery (443). For the new world gaze facilitated by the Great Exhibition, German literature appeared within a greater gallery of cultural achievements, but its visibility was made possible through a medial transformation, a metonymic transfer of text to image as a sculpture of authorship, the entirety of literary culture resting on the marble shoulders of a few authors.

The display of world literatures at the Crystal Palace was achieved through the collected likenesses of a few authors sent as national delegates to represent a part of the larger world whole. The sum of such a collection suggests a semblance of a world literary body, affirming each featured image as a specific likeness of world authorship in the mid-nineteenth century. But where were such world authors before the exhibition that validated their authorial celebrity? A popular narrative suggests that literature became “world literature” shortly before or after dinner at Goethe’s house on the evening of 31 January 1827.¹ This is when Goethe famously declared to Johann Peter Eckermann: “National-Literatur will jetzt nicht viel sagen, die Epoche der Welt-Literatur ist an der Zeit und jeder muß jetzt dazu wirken, diese Epoche zu beschleunigen” (207). To take this origin story of world literature literally would be to mistake Goethe alone for the multitude of discursive changes to the literary field around 1800 (to which he undoubtedly but not exclusively contributed). It would be equally problematic to identify a specific moment of origin of world authorship. Bruno Latour warns of mistaking the effects of epistemological shifts for their causes, doubting, for example, the sudden arrival of a new figure to incite new ways of thinking in the turn towards modern science - “no ‘new man’ suddenly emerged sometime in the sixteenth century, and there are no mutants with larger brains working inside modern laboratories who can think differently from the rest of us” (1-2). The same can be said of world authorship; there was no threshold whose crossing signified the transition from author to world author, no emergence of such a figure from one moment to the next. Yet in terms of world literature and world authorship alike, it is possible to circumvent those perceived moments of emergence by directing attention not to the single objects and figures of such world categories but to the practices of order and viewership that make...