The World Literary System

Abstract

The recent relevance of the concept of world literature is a symptom of social and political shifts in literary studies under conditions of globalization. However, the term belongs to literary comparative studies’ oldest disciplinary constants. Feeling peripheral as a German writer in relation to the French or English metropolises, Goethe launched the concept in the late 1820s. He was experiencing world literature as a rise in the circulation of literary artworks across linguistic and national borders, and increasing cultural exchange between continents and civilizations. Weltliteraur also appeared to him in the guise of the modern capitalist market going global. He considered the creative response to the world literary repertoires essential to the viability of each national literature and to cosmopolitan experiencing of the “generally human”. He transfigured the cosmopolitan idea of world literature into the poetic principle of a globalized imagination and intertextuality. The original Goethean concept has recently come back to the forefront of transnational comparative studies. Here, world literature implies practices, media, and institutions that implant transnational resources in the home literary field, allowing intercultural transfer and intertextual absorption of global cultural repertoires as well as self-conscious production for international audiences. From its origins, world literature is also a category of ethical, political, and aesthetic thought, shaped by experiences of tourism, translations, global news, archeological discoveries, etc. In order to foster intercultural transfers, a sort of infrastructure was necessary, for example the mobility of books, their systematic collection, and the encyclopedic ordering of knowledge about foreign cultures. Such networks “translated” (Latour) foreign corpora and their representations in a multitude of local archives. In the theoretical or poetic consciousness of world literature, in its intertextual coherence, as well as in its material, medial circulation, there is a taste of a “glocalization”. – Weltliteratur was launched through the ideologeme of “national literature”. Inclusion of the national in the world, the presence of the world in the national, and nationality as a necessary condition for the appearance of world literature are symptoms of the interlocking ideologies of the post-enlightenment cultural nationalism, cosmopolitanism, and the aesthetic understanding of art practices. Modern European nations were established within a new geopolitical reality that was perceived as inter-national. In literature, national identity was established relationally, through realizing its position among other languages and within the global cultural market. In their Manifesto of the Communist Party, Marx and Engels followed Goethe’s economic metaphors, connecting the planetary expansion of the capitalist economy to the beginnings of the transnational system of world literature. Indeed, the world system of capitalist economics with its cores and peripheries (Wallerstein) shows striking analogies with the “world republic of letters”, conceived by Casanova as a hierarchical semiotic space, in which the established and emerging literary fields interact from asymmetrical positions, either as centers of cultural influence or as peripheries with poorer cultural capital. According to Damrosch, world literature is reserved for the diffusion of literary texts that, after having been recognized by some global metropolis, exceed the original linguistic boundaries and become actively present in major languages or cultures. Drawing on Even-Zohar’s polysystem theory, Moretti also portrays the “world literary system” as analogous to the world economy. Strong and developed literatures, which now function as centers of the world literary system, used to be peripheral in the phase of their emergence; without interference with peripheral productivity and the resources of “small” or “minority” literatures, even central literary systems would stagnate. No cultural system is self-sufficient and free of interference. Centrality and peripherality are thus variables that depend on historical dynamics and system evolution. – Finally, the literary world system is explained as a complex topology, which is accessible only through the archives of localized cultural memory and singular cognitive or linguistic perspectives. They show world literature(s) as a set of variant corpora, representations, inspirations, and classifications. World literature is being constantly translated and presented in manifold localized inscriptions, which are the subject of reflection and reworking in different semiospheres.