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Reviewed by:
  • German Literature as World Literature ed. by Thomas Oliver Beebee
  • Katherine Arens (bio)
German Literature as World Literature. Edited by Thomas Oliver Beebee. New York/London: Bloomsbury, 2015. xii + 214 pp. Cloth $110.00.

German Literature as World Literature is an ambitious anthology with nine wide-ranging contributions addressing relations between German-language literatures and the world literature debates popular in comparative literature circles.

Thomas Oliver Beebee introduces the volume by situating German literature within the world literature debates of the last decades. He takes a Germanist point of view, not only reaffirming Goethe’s priority in setting the terms for the debate, but also reviewing various subsequent German discussions of “Weltliteratur” (world literature). To argue for “a dynamic modeling” of world literature (22), he also summarizes various models at play in the ongoing discussions. Overall, Beebee provides a useful summary of what is at stake in these debates throughout the comparative literature circle.

The first section has two articles on Goethe and Chinese literature, opening up optics not often encountered in Germanistik: Chunjie Zhang’s “Reading Goethe’s Elective Affinities (Die Wahlverwandtschaften) through The Story of the Stone (Hong Lou Meng)” and Daniel Purdy’s “Goethe, Rémusat and the Chinese Novel.” The former compares the ideas of the divinity and of femininity in the two novels; the latter, Goethe’s use of a French translation of a Chinese novel in the framework of his knowledge of world literature. Together, they help establish what was known about Chinese culture in germanophone Europe during the Enlightenment and set the tone for the volume’s consistent questioning of national literature paradigms.

The second part unites four essays that take up germanophone authors on the world stage (as “Austtrahlungen/Emanations”). Simona Moti discusses “Between Political Engagement and Political Unconscious: Hugo von Hofmannsthal and the Slavic East,” situating several of his works as political commentaries on the multiethnic Austro-Hungarian Empire. His focus remains on identity rather than on precise historical debates. Taking up another star in the germanophone firmament, Kathleen L. Komar discusses Rainer Maria Rilke as a “world author,” tracing how the author and his work resonate in the works by artists (Cy Twombly), literati (from early English [End Page 858] translations before World War I, through W. H. Auden and Pynchon), and Lady Gaga’s tattoo (90). His appeal, she notes, is in his ability to transcend words and appeal to the metaphysical. Martina Kolb takes up Bertolt Brecht as a “Homme du Monde,” focusing on his works’ resonance as it played on stages as widely dispersed as Russia, Japan, and China. David Kim takes up W. G. Sebald’s “Die Ringe des Saturn,” to argue it as representing a transnational approach to the historical trauma of the Holocaust.

The book’s third large section (“Schnittmengen/Intersections”) waxes philosophical to deal with theoretical issues that point toward significant methodological innovations. Beebee suggests a materialist approach to world literature, using early, mostly forgotten, germanophone Nobel Prize winners Rudolf C. Eucken and Paul Heyse as his case studies. Starting with the fact forgotten by many literary scholars that “some of the awards in Literature have in fact gone to historians” (139), he highlights the limitations on literary studies that do not attend to mechanisms producing literary reputation and distribution (in this case, the fact that Nobel’s will actually specified that the prize goes to “significant writing,” not just literature, as the 2015 prize, given to Svetlana Alexievich, again demonstrates). Paul Nissler sketches what he calls a “common German-Latin American space”: eras of contact between German intellectuals and Latin America, starting with Humboldt—a useful reminder to Latin Americanists of what networks exist between the cultural spheres, and to Germanists that all cultural contact is not necessarily orientalist.

The most ambitious and best researched essay in the volume is its final one: Elke Sturm-Trigonakis’s “Contemporary German-Based Hybrid Texts as a New World Literature.” She sketches theories of a “New World Literature” that would accommodate the “German” literature is actually three germanophone literatures (Austrian, Swiss, German), and then discusses issues like migration and code-switching as central in overcoming national literary study paradigms and establishing credible approaches...

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