German Literature as World Literature ed. by Thomas Oliver Beebee (review)

Approximately since the beginning of the new millennium, many critical studies have been published devoted to the concept of world literature. Some of these works focus on the theory of world literature and attempt to define this term as a concept. Others focus on the literature of the current age and define as world literature texts that are often multilingual and that thematically as well as geographically cross borders. Such works were usually defined at the onset of the millennium as “transnational.” For example, the title of the 1999 annual meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association was: “Comparative Literature and Cultural Transnationalisms: Past and Future.” “World literature” has replaced “transnationalism” as the paradigm for globalized poetic works past and present, in part, it would appear, to underscore the literally cosmopolitan character of such works, especially in the present age. Such literature does not merely cross borders, a condition suggested by the moniker “transnational,” but often encompasses much of the entire earth geographically and even linguistically/stylistically. Not coincidentally, because the concept of Weltliteratur is most closely associated at its inception as a paradigm articulated by Goethe (and, as a number of contributors to the volume under review have noted, is employed even earlier by Goethe’s contemporary and friend Christoph Martin Wieland), quite a number of world literature studies have been authored by Germanists. Nevertheless, while the global character of recent German literature has been the subject of numerous individual studies, “German literature as world literature,” that is to say, as both illustrative of but transcending the Goethean paradigm, has never been the object of a cohesive focus, and filling this lacuna is the object of this thusly titled collection of essays.

The term “cohesive focus” may be somewhat misapplied in this case, because the authors of the individual book chapters have as eclectic an understanding of the term “world literature” as the many studies of this paradigm that preceded it. Thomas Beebee attempts to provide some such cohesion in his introductory essay, drawing on such scholars of the world literature paradigm as Eric Auerbach, David Damrosch, Oswald Spengler, and Goethe and Wieland themselves, not only to give an overview of what the term has signified over the years, but also to show a certain “Ansatzpunkt” informing the essays of the current volume. Beebee’s introduction is not only useful in providing a brief overview of previous world literature models, but in showing how both past and present cosmopolitan German-language literature can be elucidated in the light of the world literature paradigm.

Subsequent to the introduction, German Literature as World Literature is divided into three parts. Part 1, “Goethe’s Weltliteratur / World Literature,” focuses on Goethe himself, specifically in his relation to Chinese thought. Chunjie Zhang compares Goethe’s Die Wahlverwandtschaften with Cao Xueqin’s The Story of the Stone, a Chinese classical novel written some twenty years prior to Goethe’s late novel. Zhang finds that Goethe’s Spinozism and Cao Xueqin’s synthetic Buddhism/Daoism inspired the two respective works, works intimately linked by principles such as “vegetative femininity,” the transience of earthly life, and the evocation of environmentally rooted mood. Daniel Purdy’s essay shows how Goethe’s famous aside on Chinese literature in Johann Peter Eckermann’s Gespräche mit Goethe was not only inspired by the French-language translation by Abel Rémusat of a somewhat critically unappreciated Chinese novel, but also by Rémusat’s prefatory theoretical pronouncements, as well as Goethe’s own somewhat cursory studies of Chinese language and literature. There are four essays in part 2 of German Literature as World Literature, “Ausstrahlungen/Emanations.” Simona Moti’s essay on “Hugo von Hofmannsthal and the Slavic East,” while providing an excellent overview of the author’s attitude toward this region, shows his attitude toward the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s Slavic domains was decidedly at variance with the ideal of cosmopolitan inclusiveness and respect inherent in Goethe’s...