Introduction: Worlding French-Canadian Literatures/Littératures franco-canadiennes et littérature-monde

We open our introduction by addressing the title of this theme-issue. The fact that the title places the English and the French languages in parallel is, on the one hand, misleading. Some readers will know, while others may suspect, that the two parts of the title effectively say two different things in two different languages. The bilingual title is, on the other hand, relatively straightforward. It reflects the bilingual content of the nine articles gathered here, six of which are written in French and three in English by scholars based in Canada, the United States, and Central Europe. It also anticipates the disciplinary bridge-building work in which the authors engage in order variously to bring together two disciplines that rarely enter into sustained dialogue with one another: World Literature and Canadian literatures in French.

“Worlding French-Canadian literatures” does not mean the same thing, nor does it raise the same sets of questions or expectations, as “Littératures franco-canadiennes et littérature-monde.” As Catherine Khordoc points out in her essay in this issue, the verb “to world” (or in its continuous form, “worlding”) signals an ongoing process, a remapping of literary landscapes. Khordoc cites Eric Hayot to the effect that “worlding creates worlds because it bespeaks the part’s relation to the whole, but also because in that speaking it imagines (or recreates) the whole that opens to the part” (Hayot 2012b, 228). The term “worlding” may be considered an appropriate translation of “mondifié” proposed by Kateri Lemmens (2011, 218). The latter term, according to Khordoc, “opens more widely the possibility of examining works that, while they may not have been translated and may or may not circulate outside of their culture of origin, bring into dialogue within the text itself diverse linguistic, cultural, and national traditions thus bringing the reader into a globalized literary world.”

In 1827, the German philosopher Johann Wolfgang von Goethe famously coined the term Weltliteratur in a conversation with his disciple, Johann Peter Eckermann. Reacting with enthusiasm to the unprecedented circulation of literary works in Europe and the non-West, Goethe announced that “national literature is now rather an unmeaning term; the epoch of world literature is at hand” (Goethe and Eckermann [1827] 2009, 23). Since 1827, however, the interrelated questions of what constitutes a “world” and what counts as “literature” have proven difficult to answer. David Damrosch (2003, 1) has observed that Weltliteratur simultaneously “crystallized ... a sense of an arising global modernity” while also remaining “extraordinarily elusive, from the moment of its formulation onward: What does it really mean to speak of a ‘world literature’?”. Arguably the most influential answers to Damrosch’s question have revolved around the idea that global literary space is governed by market-driven demands. Literary value, in turn, is determined by “mode[s] of circulation and of [close] reading” (Damrosch 2003, 5), by comprehensive methodologies such as “distant reading”(Moretti 2000), or by intense competition “between a [literary] capital, on the one hand, and peripheral [literary] dependencies,” on the other (Casanova [1999] 2007, 11).

Defined in such ways, “world literature” emphasizes literature’s relative visibility in the global literary marketplace for it is predicated on comparing literary texts that have been endowed with institutional authority, have been issued by reputable publishers, have circulated widely, or have been made available to foreign readers in reliable translations. Responding to the notion that international circulation is the basic prerequisite for global visibility, Nicole Nolette, in her essay that opens this issue, argues for a more normative conceptualization of “world” in its adjectival form. Writing of French-Canadian theatre, Nolette identifies David Damrosch (2003) and Glen Odom (2017) as paradigmatic instances in which the “world” fails to realize its theoretical potential, figuring as it does as geographical scope amplified by diversity: “une portée géographique amplifiée garante de diversité plutôt qu’une considération des effets et imaginaires transnationaux, ou même de la circulation des styles, formes et représentations d’un espace à un autre.” Nolette implicitly echoes Pheng Cheah (2016) who...