Where is World Literature Now?: Conversations Over Time and Across Space

"What are we to make of world literature today?" David Damrosch asks toward the beginning of his introduction to the recently published anthology, World Literature in Theory. Taken together, Damrosch's anthology and Rebecca Walkowitz's critical study Born Translated provide occasion to reflect on how the fields of Comparative Literature and World Literature have developed and where they now are. A number of themes and concerns emerge in these works: a challenge to distinct national literary traditions and increasing attention to interactions between traditions; ways in which texts travel and circulate in new contexts; debates about depth and breadth of knowledge (expertise and dilettantism) within fields of study; the relative power of particular languages and literary traditions within the context of global capitalism; possible ideological and political meanings associated with the designation "world literature"; ways to resist tendencies to domesticate foreign texts as they move from one context to another; debates over "universalism"; and the essential role of translation as an enterprise that makes texts accessible to other linguistic communities (what is translated, into what languages, why, and to what effect).

Anthologies, such as the one Damrosch has compiled, bring together key statements in one place and time, allowing readers to see issues and trends, and trace conversations over time, across space. An anthology helps consolidate a field and circumscribes a body of work deemed essential for the field. Starting points matter, as Edward Said reminds us in Beginnings: Intention and Method; they launch particular trajectories, foreclosing and facilitating certain perspectives. Heading off the lineup here is an account of Goethe's well-known statements on world literature, recorded by Eckermann. Indeed, many of the subsequent pieces refer to Goethe's notion of Weltliteratur, suggesting limitations to Goethe's views and noting possible similarities between that historical moment and ours. René Etiemble, for instance, in "Should We Rethink the Notion of World Literature?" acknowledges that "because the concept of Weltliteratur was coined in German (and by what a German!) it has always retained, at least for certain people, the taint of a germanocentrism" (87). Nevertheless, he maintains, we must not retreat from ventures to transcend prejudices of birth and should seek to understand traditions other than those with which we are comfortable, fully aware of limitations. And in "To World, to Globalize: World Literature's Crossroads," Djelal Kadir, attending to challenges of "globalization" in our own historical moment, submits that "not unlike Goethe, we are still straining to interrogate and chart the multivalent space that encompasses and that is encompassed by what we call the world, a space where the local and the global continue to contend" (267). In the epilogue, "The Changing Concept of World Literature," Zhang Longxi returns to Goethe, arguing that there is now "a much greater need to open one's eyes beyond the tunnel vision of one's own group or community, and a much greater readiness to embrace alterity beyond one's linguistic and cultural comfort zones …" (515).

While there might be nearly unanimous agreement among authors included in this volume on the value of seeking knowledge of world literatures, there is considerable debate and discussion regarding how we should proceed, how to negotiate the challenges and land mines. Stephen Owen ("Stepping Forward and Back") serves up the tempting, readily digestible metaphor of the "food court" for thinking about the operation of world literature, where there is room for a limited number of national cuisines, each with its own representative dish, acceptable to domestic palates. Franco Moretti presents a method of "distance reading," based on systems theory, that tracks and accounts for (unequal) exchanges and flows. In such an approach, attention is focused not on reading all available texts from all cultures (an impossible task) but on relationships between texts—"devices, themes, tropes—or genres and systems" (162) involving a "compromise [End Page 668...