Reexamining World Literature: Challenging Current Assumptions and Envisioning Possibilities by Richard Serrano (review)

The author of three engaging books on topics covering interrelated traditions in French, Arabic, and East Asian literatures, Richard Serrano has spent the past two decades broadening the Comparative Literature curriculum at Rutgers University. In Spring 2020, he initiated a popular new course on “The Global Eighteenth Century.” This fourth volume, which informed that class’s teaching philosophy, is the latest installment in Serrano’s lifelong project of expanding the availability of obscure works and encouraging us to reflect on how we read literary works in a global context. A fifth work currently in progress, World Literature and the Challenge of Translation, will concentrate on 21st-century authors.

On the face of it, Reexamining World Literature is not an eighteenth-century book. The subject matter ranges from the medieval period to the present day. Three of the six chapters, however, are concerned with overlooked authors of the long eighteenth century, making a powerful argument in favor of their inclusion in our assessment of the period’s literary production. For academics in their roles as both educators and researchers, this book is important to consider for the innovation of its conception as well as for its argument and readings. Through six representative case studies, the author invites us to break from the temptation to ignore or push aside works that resist familiar genre boundaries or prevailing schools of criticism. This temptation is especially strong in the classroom, where we often strive to create a cohesive thematic narrative at the risk of oversimplifying the human experience to fulfill expectations that we ourselves have set up. Citing the claims of Gayatri Spivak and Emily Apter that “our view of the world is necessarily skewed by the availability of works relatively easy to translate into English,” Serrano suggests, “I would push this further. It is not simply a question of whether a work can be translated easily or well into English, but whether it fits easily into categories of literature that the reader in English finds comfortable” (119).¹ In Reexamining World Literature, Serrano proposes that the vitality of the study of world literature demands that we counteract such overdependence on familiar anthologized material and theoretical frameworks by asking new questions, drawing attention to works, authors, and genres that few many have heard of, and, when possible, making new works available for further exploration by our colleagues and students through translation.

In Chapter 1, Serrano challenges prevailing notions of prose fiction as the preeminent form in eighteenth-century China through a close reading of seven short poems by Sun Yunfeng (1764–1814). The first and most important poet in the coterie of her patron Yuan Mei, and a focus of his influential Anthology of Poetry by the Female Disciples of Harmony Garden (1796), Sun Yunfeng was famous during her lifetime but lost popularity when later generations turned away from the classical style she favored and extended. Unlike the subjects of Chapters 5 and 6, Sun Yunfeng has not been neglected altogether; in fact, her reputation is currently on the rise.² As with other undervalued authors who have regained prominence both in the West and in their home countries as a result of renewed interest from Western academics, Sun Yunfeng has benefited from the “literary archeology” of feminist critics who in the past two decades have returned attention to Qing dynasty poets along with their European sisters—though Serrano suggests that some of her more transgressive poems still languish in obscurity because “their inability to meet the expectations of the scholar reading them as a woman’s poetry has further marginalized them” (7, 8).

Chapter 1 provides fresh translations and detailed analyses of representative examples of such neglected poems, alongside precursors on similar subjects by some of the male Tang Dynasty poets who developed the conventions that underlie Sun Yunfeng’s imagery and subjects. Such comparisons can be overlooked in a World Literature courses because of the traditional separation of medieval and early modern...