Recoding World Literature: Libraries, Print Culture, and Germany's Pact with Books by B. Venkat Mani (review)

"World literature"—a concept once reviled because of its canonical implications—has made an unexpected comeback, in part because of an (equally unpredictable) alliance with postcolonial theory. Venkat Mani's latest book is one of a series of attempts to explore the usefulness of the concept in a postcolonial context. Within this debate Venkat Mani positions himself by arguing for a material history of "world literature," less however by tracing the (material) distribution of individual texts—although there are a few examples of that as well—, but rather by focusing on the institutions and technologies available to distribute books (or their contents) to readers. The study covers topics as diverse as libraries' attempts to globalize their holdings, infrastructures and networks for the supply of "world literature," the origins of the Reclam Universal-Bibliothek (for which a change in German copyright law was largely responsible), the importance of literary magazines for familiarizing their readers with texts outside of their linguistic and cultural community, and Mani's book, in its final chapter, also looks at the World Wide Web as a "library without walls." Recoding World Literature is a book about what Mani calls bibliomigrancy—the movement and travel of books across linguistic, cultural, and national borders.

"World literature" is not by necessity a cosmopolitan, emancipatory notion, as Mani makes clear. The way the concept has been used is deeply Eurocentric, in an unholy alliance with Western imperialism, and it has often served to essentialize cultures by reducing them to a few canonical texts. This story has been told before, but never in such historical detail and using these specific data. Although the concept has often been understood to advocate for a cosmopolitan attitude towards other cultures—Ernst Moritz Arndt cautioned that it would seduce readers away from national literatures and the nation more generally (108)—it was not at all incompatible with the idea of a "national literature," and at times both notions co-existed without problems (128). Without a doubt the term was appropriated for questionable, not exactly cosmopolitan purposes. The Nazis instrumentalized the concept for their cause, as can be seen for instance in the magazine Weltliteratur, launched in October 1935 by the Wiking Verlag in Berlin and edited by Hellmuth Langenbucher. It is startling to discover how some of the themes associated with "world literature"—the idea of acquainting oneself with the "intellectual wealth of other nations" (160)—now became part of a racially tainted Völkerkunde promoted by Nazi Germany. But the ambiguities associated with the term can be found elsewhere as well. Even some members of the initial Nobel committee, facing the decision whether, in line with Alfred Nobel's instructions, to also institute a prize in Nobel's name for literature, had their reservations; these members feared that such an enterprise would "detract from the Academy's proper concerns and turn it into a 'cosmopolitan tribunal of literature'"—not something that was meant as a compliment (137). Similarly, while many in (West) Germany spoke out in favor of the importance of translated literature, in the late 1940s there was also a concern about the German market being flooded by foreign literature (206–7).

In his archaeology of the term "world literature," Venkat Mani focuses on some theorists whose roles have been underexamined, among them Heine, who coined the term "Welthülfsliteratur," commenting on an intellectual revolution going on in France in 1828, the same year in which Goethe addressed the topic (97), and Hermann Hesse, whose essay "Eine Bibliothek der Weltliteratur" (1928) was meant as an attempt to democratize the concept by encouraging readers to compose their own libraries of "world literature" (148–49). Mani's reading of Auerbach's classical "Philologie der Weltliteratur" (1952) is detailed and sympathetic, but also skeptical; he appreciates Auerbach's arguing for the need of "a multiplicity of points of departure" (187) within the debate on "world literature," but in his view Auerbach forgets...