Debating World Literature

by Prendergast, Christopher; Anderson, Benedict; Apter, Emily; Corngold, Stanley; Dew, Nicholas

• ISBN13: 9781859844588
• ISBN10: 1859844588
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2004-03-17
• Publisher: Verso

Summary

In the continuing debates about the cultural dimensions of globalization, the question of 'literature' has been something of a poor relation. This volume seeks to redress the balance. Its starting point is Goethe's idea of Weltliteratur , from which it travels out to various parts of the globe at different historical junctures. Its concerns include the legacy of Goethe's idea, variable understandings of the term 'literature' itself, cross-cultural encounters (the contact of the oral and the written, the paradoxes of 'exoticism'), the nature of 'small literatures', and the cultural politics of literary genres (poetry and the novel). The underlying objective of the volume is to transcend the pieties and simplifications of polemic in a seach for the complexity embodied in the linking of the two terms 'world' and 'literature'.

Author Biography

Christopher Prendergast is Professor of Modern French Literature at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of King’s College Cambridge. He is the co-editor of World Reader, an anthology of world literature.

Benedict Anderson is Aaron L. Binenkorp Professor of International Studies Emeritus at Cornell University. He is editor of the journal Indonesia and author of Java in a Time of Revolution, The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia, and the World and Imagined Communities.

Emily Apter is Professor of Comparative Literature and French at New York University. Her published works include The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature and Continental Drift: From National Characters to Subjects.

Stanley Corngold is Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Princeton University. He is translator and editor of the Norton Critical Edition of Metamorphosis, author of Lambent Traces: Franz Kafka, Franz Kafka: The Necessity of Form, Complex Pleasure: Forms of Feeling in German Literature, The Fate of the Self: German Writers and French Theory, and Thomas Mann, 1875–1955. He is the recipient of Literary Paternity, Literary Friendship: Essays in Honor of Stanley Corngold.

Franco Moretti teaches English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He is the author of Signs Taken for Wonders, The Way of the World and Modern Epic, all from Verso.

Table of Contents

Introduction	vii
Christopher Prendergast
The World Republic of Letters	1	(25)
Christopher Prendergast
Changing Fields: The Directions of Goethe's Weltliteratur	26	(28)
Stefan Hoesel-Uhlig
World Literature and World Thoughts: Brandes/Auerbach	54	(22)
Peter Madsen
Global Translatio: The `Invention' of Comparative Literature, Istanbul, 1933	76	(34)
Emily Apter
Mapping Identities: Literature, Nationalism, Colonialism	110	(38)
Timothy J. Reiss
Conjectures on World Literature	148	(15)
Franco Moretti
The Politics of Genre	163	(12)
Stephen Heath
Literary History without Literature: Reading Practices in the Ancient World	175	(22)
Simon Goldhill
The Rooster's Egg: Pioneering World Folklore in the Philippines	197	(17)
Benedict Anderson
Hearing Voices: Ricardo Palma's Contextualization of Colonial Peru	214	(19)
Elisa Sampson Vera Tudela
The Order of Oriental Knowledge: The Making of d'Herbelot's Bibliotheque orientale	233	(20)
Nicholas Dew
Victor Segalen Abroad	253	(19)
John Sturrock
Kafka and the Dialect of Minor Literature	272	(19)
Stanley Corngold
Rhythmical Knots: The World of English Poetry	291	(28)
Bruce Clunies Ross
India in the Mirror of World Fiction	319	(16)
Francesca Orsini
Notes on Contributors	335	(2)
Acknowledgements	337	(2)
Index	339