World Literature and Its Problems: A Study of David Damrosch

The concept of “World Literature” emerges from Goethe. In January 1827, while speaking to his young disciple Johann Peter Eckermann he opined, “national literature is now a rather unmeaning term; the epoch of world literature is at hand, and everyone must strive to hasten its approach” (qtd in Damrosch 1). He used the term Weltliteratur, which became famous with the publication of Conversations 1835.

Later Karl Marx and Hegel used the term in Communist Manifesto, “national one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures there arises a world literature” (qtd in Damrosch 4). Marx and Hegel found that World literature is an essential part of the modern world.

The rapid expansion of globalization has further complicated the concept of world literature. So, there are serious questions on what the term and its implications. According to David Damrosch:

I take world literature to encomapass all literary works that circulate beyond their culture of origin, either in translation or in their original language (Virgil was long read in Latin in Euorpe). In its most expansive senses, world literature would include any work that has ever reached beyond its base . . . a work only has an effective life as world literature whenever, and wherever, it is actively present within a literary system beyond that of its original culture.

(4)

Today, literature that can be classified under the category of world literature is large. The number of works that come to the international literature circle are increasing day by day. They stem from diverse cultural and linguistic background. As a result, the context of the work is often risked at the process of the transformation to world literature. This lack of specialized knowledge about the context and cultural background often lead to imposition of domestic literary values on the foreign work and there would be even the attempt to read the foreign work in the light of Western critical theory.

Some scholars argue that literary works across cultures exhibit what Northrop Frye thought of as archetypes or what more recently the French comparatist Etiemble has called “invariants”. Etiemble argued that common literary patterns must provide the necessary basis for any truly global understanding of literature (5).

Damrosch does not want to stretch the concept of world literature to the complex multiplicity of separate national traditions. He tries to simplify all the complexities of the concept, “my claim is that world literature is not an infinite, ungraspable canon of works but rather a mode of circulation and of reading, a mode that is as applicable to individual works as to bodies of material, available for reading established classics and new discoveries alike” (5). There is not any single set canon of world literature and also it has not any single method to read world literature.

A work enters into world literature by two process; first by being a literature and second, by circulating out into a broader world beyond its linguistic and cultural point of origin. A work can be part of world literature for sometimes and fall out from its position. A work can come in and go out many times from the sphere of world literature over the century. And again, for some readers a work may function as world literature and for others it does not. Only a few works secure their position in the sphere of world literature quickly and permanently.

As the work enters into the sphere of world literature it suffers from the loss of the authenticity or essence at the same time it can gain many things. To understand this one must follow the transformation of the work from its local cultural background to the sphere of world literature. Damrosch opines that to understand the working of the world literature what we need to understand is the phenomenology rather than an ontology of the work of art. “A literary work manifests differently abroad than it does at home” (6).

The variability of world literature is conspicuous in Goethe’s conversations with Eckermaan. He had a lively sense of the ways his own books could benefit by translation. And also, he read voraciously a wide range of foreign translations. Goethe points out “I do not like to read my Faust any more in German” but for him the French translation of the work is “again fresh, new, and spirited” even though the translation is mostly in prose. Goethe reads the English and French commentaries on German literature and opines that they are sharper and clearer than German criticism.

Goethe loves foreign works as much as German literature. While reading a Serbian poem The Prison-Key, Eckermann complained about the poem’s abruptness, its violation of neo-classical canons of balance and harmony, Goethe disagreed, “[that] is the beauty of it; for it thus leaves a sting in the heart. . . . That which is set forth in the poem is really new and beautiful; and the poet acted very wisely in delineating this alone and leaving the rest to the reader” (Damrosch 10).

In his reading of foreign texts, Goethe partly responds to cultural difference, partly projecting his own values outward and partly finding in the foreign text a middle quality. For his there is a distinctive novelty and a similarity in these works. Damrosch observes that a foreign text operate along all three of these dimensions, “a sharp difference we enjoy for its sheer novelty; a gratifying similarly that we find in the text or project onto it; and a middle range of what is like-but-unlike­­—the sort of relation most likely to make a productive change in our own perception and practices” (Damrosch 12).

But Goethe is not perfect in his perceptions. The Western Europe remains the privileges modern world of reference for him, and Greeks and Rome provide the crucial antiquity to which he always returns (12).

The world has often been seen in one or more of three ways; as an established body of classics, as an evolving canon of masterpieces, or as a multiple windows on the world. The “classic” is work with transcendent and even foundational values. It is often identified with Greek and Roman literature. Hence it is associated with imperial values. On the other hand “masterpiece” can be an ancient or modern work. It does not need any foundational cultural force. The concept of masterpieces emerges in the nineteenth century when there was studies began to deemphasize the dominant Greco-Roman classics, and attempts to elevate the masterpieces to the near equality with long established classics. Masterpieces engages in great conversations with their aristocratic forbearers. All these works function as the windows into foreign worlds.

These three concepts are not mutually exclusive, though sometimes people of decided taste champion one or another and even attempt to portray their favored mode as the one form of literature worth serious attention. Goethe holds all three conceptions together. Virgil’s Aeneid fulfills all the three dimensions. It is a timeless classic, a masterpiece of its genre and also a window on the world of imperial Rome.

In 1993, American Comparative Literature Association made a committee headed by Charles Bernheimer. The report of the committee urged that the comparatist must engage in reconceiving the canon, paying particular attention to “various contestatory, marginal, or subaltern perspectives” (Damrosch 16). The report was intended to expand the canon rather than abandoning the older canon. Again, John Guillory has remarked that the traditional European canon has been a white male affair in large part because, until fairly recently, few women and minority writers had access to literacy, much less publication.

Damrosch warns against the insistence of modern American culture; the insistence of presentism. “Presentism deprive us of the ability to learn from a much wider range of empires, colonies, politics, and migrations; it also leaves out of account the dramatic ways in which the canons of the earlier periods themselves are being reshaped through new attention to all sorts of long-neglected but utterly fascinating texts” (17).

Another challenge faced by world literature is the “Americanization” of literature. Masao Miyoshi and Lawrence Venuti point out that texts from Japan and Italy often had more to do with American interests and needs than with genuine openness to other cultures. Even today, foreign works will rarely be translated at all in the United States, much less widely distributed, unless they reflect American concerns and fit comfortably with American images of the foreign culture in question (18).

There are challenges in the field of production also, in recent years many works are produced primarily for foreign consumption. Here it is contrasting that writers like Dante never thought of writing other than to the immediate readers available.

Damrosch observes that writing for publication abroad can be a heroic act of resistance for some, yet it can also be a leveling process of global consumerism. Tim Brennan observes “several younger writers have entered a genre of third-world metropolitan fiction whose conventions have given their novel the unfortunate feel of ready-mades. In Tariq Ali’s opinions like the junk foods and junk television, there are also “junk novels”.

Steven Owen in his essay “what Is World Poetry?” flanks contemporary Chinese poetry. He opines that third world poets are often subjected to the hegemony of Western powers. As a result, they begin to write world poetry imitating the Western modernism (19). Owen observes that this new type of world poetry floats free of contexts and lack real literary power. He condemns that today the international readers of poetry do not come in search for poetry at all. Instead they are looking for windows upon other cultural phenomena. “They may be looking for some exotic religious tradition or political struggle” (19).

He views the Chinese poet Bei Dao’s poems as a secondhand American modernism. Though they are vivid the lines are empty for Owen. “Most of the poems translate themselves. They could just as easily be translated from a Slovak or an Estonian or a Philippine poet. . . . The poetry of The August Sleepwalker is a poetry written to travel well” (20). But in Writing Diaspora, Rey Chow criticized Owen’s positon. She call Owens views as orientalist and even “racist”. She argued that the problem is not with the poetry but with the Western critic’s loss of authority (20).

Damrosch also points out the difference in McDougall’s and Finkel’s translation of Bei Dao’s poem “The Answer”. “McDougall’s translation clearly tries to convey an underlying word play in the original, but the result is stilted and unpoetic English; Finkel’s translation is freer but also more readable, and without the constraint of making the end of the opening lines echo the beginning” (23).

In the process of translation, all works cease to be the exclusive products of their original culture. They have just “began” in their original language. For the foreign reader, the crucial issue is how well the poems work in the new language. When the literary work moves to the sphere of world literature it takes a new life. To understand this new life we need to look closely at the ways the work becomes reframed in its translations and in its new cultural contexts (24). Fernando Ortiz points out that in the process of transculturation, the images in the work undergoes multiple refraction. Damrosch borrows form Vinay Dharwadker and points out that world literature can be described as “a montage of overlapping maps in motion” (24). This motion involves shifting relations both of literary history and of cultural power.

Another important feature is that the works rarely cross the borders in full equality. “All works are subject to manipulation and even deformation in their foreign reception, but established classics usually gain a degree of protection by their cultural prestive. The works of non-Western authors or by provisional or subordinate western writers are always particularly liable to be assimilates to the immediate interests and agendas of those who edit, translate, and interpret them (25).

Damrosch likes to distinguish between “global literature” and world literature. The “global literature” that might be read solely in airline terminals, is unaffected by any specific context.

Damrosch opines that modern literature can be studies in global terms within the “poly systems” framework developed by translation theorists like Itamar Even-Zohar, or the sociopolitical “world systems” approach based in the writings of Immanuel Wallerstein. A notable example of such work is Franco Moretti’s ambitious maping of the spread of the novel, beginning with his Atlas of the European Novel 1800-1900 (25). He recalls Northrop Fry’s method in Anatomy of Criticism, where Fry’s rapid surveys of patterns and motifs in a wide range of works. He proposes two metaphoric approaches of change; trees and wave. Individual works can be studies by specialists as off shoots of a family tree; and the global comparatism which concentrates wave patterns of transformation sweeping around the world.

World literature is constituted very differently in different cultures. A close attention to the given cultural system gives much information about the cultural context. A culture’s norms and needs profoundly shape the selection of works that enter into it as world literature, influencing the ways they are translated, marketed, and read (26).

Now Damrosch goes back again to Eckermann and points out the issues involved in his work translations in home and abroad. None of his attempts to write in high genres was success. But his more popular form of writing became famous and was translated to all the European languages. The Conversation was poorly received at home. But as a world literature it was very popular. It had many editions and different versions. Every version of the book has its own varieties. While one edition has a “classical” ending, another edition that was published eleven years after has a “biblical” ending. Even Goethe’s woks were more famous in the sphere of world literature rather than at his home. Eckermaan’s book thus provides an interesting example of a work that only achieves an effective presence in its country of origin after it has already entered world literatue.

Later there were many traslations, an abridged translation by Margaret Fuller. But late John Oxenford expanded Fullers translation. In this translation, ironically, Goethe was placed as the author, not Eckermann. His authority of the text diminished along with the authorship. In the 1850 version of the book, Oxenford again systematically reduces Eckermann’s presence. He abridged Eckermann’s autobiographical introcution. In 1930 edition of Oxenford’s translation, Havelock Ellis, in his preface tries to acknowledge the contributions of Eckermann.

In the recent reissue of the Oxenford’s translation, Goethe himself is taken out of history. In the cover of the text, a Roman Goethe is portrayed. While the Conversations pictured Goethe aged seventy four, in the cover photo, he is only around forty. “Crossing the English Channel, Goethe revives like Dracula form his bier and becomes the author of the book that records his own death. Damrosch points out the problems and challenges of world literature. In the complex and different process of transformation, a work often loses its authors soul, and becomes a different work.

The concept of world literature is not free of problems and challenges. Among the many advantages and privileges of world literature there permeates the challenges and problems. But a reversal to the regional parochialism will not solve the issues. It is a thread connecting different regional and cultural contexts. There must be reasonable discussions and debates among the scholars regarding the issue and there must be initiatives to find a solution.  

Bibliography

Damrosch, David. What is World Literature? New Jersey: Princeton UP, 2003. Print.