Introduction: Global Crises And Twenty-First-Century World Literature

In his 2017 Nobel Lecture, Kazuo Ishiguro makes a slightly lugubrious remark on the new century we are living in, before reaffirming the importance of literature and appealing for more diversity in our common literary world. To the Japanese-born British novelist's dismay, the present world is a "much smaller" place than he had ever imagined, and our time is "of dangerously increasing division."¹ Having taken "the unstoppable advance of liberal-humanist values" in Europe and America for granted, Ishiguro admits that it may have been "an illusion," and that he has been "living for some years in a bubble."² His pessimism is not unusual in our time, and with good reasons—the terrorist attacks in the United States on September 11, 2001, the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the financial crash of 2008, the European Union (EU) refugee crisis, and the proliferation of Far Right ideologies and nationalisms in Europe, to name but a few. Even meteorological disasters like Hurricane Katrina could develop into devastating man-made crises, owing to New Orleans' notorious social imparity and civic mismanagement. Ishiguro finally reassures his audience, however, that our twenty-first-century literature, if opened up to "what remain today unknown literary culture," will be particularly important and give us a leg up "as we cross this difficult terrain."³

Without specific reference to the term "Weltliteratur," this Nobel appeal entails a similarly ideal vision of literary writing which goes beyond, diachronically and synchronically, the boundaries of national literatures in our crisis-ridden age. Crisis and world literature have been entangled with each other in various ways since the concept was first formulated by Goethe, and later consecrated by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels in Das kommunistische Manifest (The Communist Manifesto, 1848). For the former, world literature was meant to end a nationalist crisis, that is, German's "cultural dependence on France," and was a solution to the dilemma of a German intellectual "caught between metropolitan domination and nativist nationalism" in the 1820s⁴; for the latter, world literature, albeit bourgeois, could be valorized, under the force of colonialism and global capital, as a cosmopolitan literary culture to come, which would antiquate "national one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness"⁵ during the European Revolutions of 1848, another crisis year. Leo Spitzer and Erich Auerbach, two German philology scholars of Jewish ancestry, who fled Nazism and took refuge in Istanbul, embraced the idea of world literature in their critical works, because it "would help stitch together the torn fabric of Western civilization."⁶ Thus, the rise and evolution of the notion of Weltliteratur is directly in response to crisis events in history, particularly in the West. One is tempted to say that world literature, itself a crisis mode of cultural production, continues to engage with crises on the local and global scales over the course of the twentieth century and the present. From epidemics to political scams and scandals, climate change to species extinction, financial crashes to terrorism, world literature reflects, intervenes in, and is being shaped by these crises.

Before turning to the intersection of world literature and global crises, we might pause over the historically slippery and culturally specific meanings of "crisis." Etymologically speaking, "crisis" is derived from the Ancient Greek "κρίσις," the verb form of which originally means "to choose," "to judge," and "to decide." In classical Greek, a term loaded with such a broad spectrum of meanings, as Reinhart Koselleck notes, "was central to politics" of the civic community at that time.⁷ The judicial meaning of κρίσις (krisis) was passed down to the Old and New Testaments, but where κρίσις (krisis) denotes a decisive moment at court or in a polis, the term in the Christian tradition points to God's Last Judgment, which is believed to be inevitable and "contains a promise of salvation."⁸ The modern usage of "crisis" in the West has also acquired two significantly new meanings. The first global economic crisis of 1857 prompted German lexicographers to register an economic meaning for "Krise."⁹ For Marx and Engels, such "commercial crises" are inescapable and recurrent in...