Literature and Language

Early in their careers, most comparatists no doubt have faced the challenging task of explaining to curious interlocutors what comparative literature as a discipline is. Part of the challenge of explaining the discipline is that over the decades since its institutionalization in American academe it was been relatively flexible in expanding and reconfiguring itself to accommodate new areas and techniques for teaching and research. This flexibility and elasticity notwithstanding, one of the enduring characteristics that has served as something of a hallmark and a distinguishing feature over and against national language and cultural studies departments is the comparative juxtaposition of literary works from differing cultural and linguistic backgrounds—ideally in their original language—with the anticipation that this contrastive reading strategy will reveal important aspects of the texts under consideration more forcefully and clearly than their study in the context of their culture of origin alone. Although universal admiration for both the breadth and depth of the erudition of some of the earliest practitioners of the discipline remains undiminished—for Spitzer, Auerbach, and Curtius—during the early phases of its institutional life, comparative literature was comparing things that were not very different. As has been so often noted, the locus of attention was clearly western Europe centering on the Rhine River valley and North America. More recently significant initiatives to include the rest of Europe, Latin America, east and south Asia, the Middle East, the traditions of the Pacific basin, and north as well as sub-Saharan Africa have been undertaken and proven generally successful. The International Comparative Literature Association has affiliated associations in all these areas and is sponsoring major research efforts dealing with many of them.

Just as the cultural-geographic purview of the discipline has expanded so have its methods and focus. During the 1980s in many institutions, comparative literature became the principal domicile of literary theory, which now has migrated in a number of different directions and more recently has been particularly hospitable to various approaches to identity formation and definition. It has responded to new methods of instruction and research that have come from both relatively proximate as well as more remote disciplinary investigations. Among the most recent of these—world literature—is obviously closely allied to comparative literature and at once addresses its historical Eurocentricism. It offers an exciting and highly stimulating new reading strategy that, as a number of books published in the recent years clearly suggest, has important implications for how literature is taught and for new emphases that can be brought to bear on understanding the production and dissemination of literary works. In a pioneering volume, David Damrosch defines world literature with an elegant succinctness that explicitly excludes any claim to chaotic universal inclusiveness, but rather as a “mode of circulation and reading” (5) applicable to individual as well as collections of works that range from established canonical masterpieces to new works that come to the attention of scholars and critics. He begins his discussion of world literature in this sense with a detailed presentation of Goethe’s famous use of the term Weltliteratur in a discussion with his secretary Johann Peter Eckermann and interestingly draws Eckermann out of the shadows cast by Goethe’s luminous presence in which he has for so many years remained all but hidden. I would like, though, to revisit this exchange and some of Goethe’s other references to the all-important concept of world literature in order to examine some telling details.

As is very well known, on Wednesday, January 31, 1827, Goethe advised his young secretary that the age of national literatures had passed and that the morning of Weltliteratur was dawning.¹ Since parts of Europe of great importance from a literary point view were not yet nations in any modern sense of the word—Germany and Italy for example—he must have intended nation to stand for something like linguistic or closely-knit cultural communities. As comparatists we all presumably agree that the observation was prescient and that the broadly encompassing and international contextualization of literature is a mode of literary study that offers numerous insights not readily available from a narrower...