Continentalization

Theoretical Model of Cosmopolitanism

I have just returned to New York City after an absence of two and a half months. In that time, spent on a small island in British Columbia, it was a period of working on my novel, and I had very little Goethe material on hand, aside from Eckermann's Conversations and a book on Goethe's use of the superlative, the subject of a small volume by Mathias Mayer that I have just finished writing a review of. The return home has prompted me to undertake some housecleaning, which means thinning out files. Since the publication in the spring of my essay on Fritz Strich and world literature, it is high time to attack my copious files on that subject. This morning an article by Paul Michael Lützeler fell out of an overstuffed folder, to which was attached my handwritten notes. The title was "Europäischer Kosmopolitismus und Weltlteratur -- Goethe und Euorpa -- Europa and Goethe." It appeared in a volume called Kontinentalisierung. Das Europa der Schriftsteller, published in 2007 by De Gruyter. "Cosmopolitanism" is one of those terms that gets on my nerves, so here goes.

The first of my handwritten notes was a question: Did Edward Said really believe, as he is quoted by Lützeler,  that Goethe's "underlying and perhaps unrealizable rationale [for world literature] was [a] vast synthesis of the world's literary production transcending borders and languages, but not in any way effacing the individuality and historical concreteness of its constituent parts"? (My italics.) Whatever one thinks about the "vast synthesis" part of that statement, it is evident that non-European national languages have little viability in the literary marketplace today. Whether it is true, as John Noyes has written that “the mother tongue preprograms an individual’s thought with an entire cultural history of interpreting the world,” most people in the world today, even when they are literate, do not speak or write in a language that has a well-developed written tradition that reflects the history contained in such a tradition. Thus, despite the establishment of “official” languages in former colonial lands, when non-Europeans enter the public sphere today, they tend to write in a “universal” language, if not English, then French, Spanish, Chinese, or Arabic, all reflecting earlier colonial or imperial domination. That sounds to me like the effacement of "the individuality and historical concreteness" of the constituent parts of which Said was speaking.

Lützeler does not seem aware of this irony in his praise of cosmopolitanism and in anointing Goethe its spiritual father. Writers of the various countries of Europe, after all, enjoy large "native" publics and, no matter the extent of their "Europeanness" or their cosmopolitanism, continue to write in their own languages. For them, there has been no effacement of individuality, and indeed, one only has to consider the major writers of the Enlightenment -- proponents of universal values -- all of whom wrote in their mother tongue. "Europe" only began in the early 19th century, and it arose through through trade and commerce, which also included literary and cultural products.

Science is a different matter, While David Damrosch contends that a work of world literature “has an exceptional ability to transcend the boundaries of the culture that produces it," in truth it is that other European idiom, the language of science, that has transcended the boundaries of the culture that produced it. This idiom, to use Friedrich Schlegel’s formulation, is universal and progressive. All peoples of the earth today, whatever their national origin, can learn to speak it or apply its precepts without knowledge of the history of science. (This claim is not to deny the historical contributions of non-Europeans to this product, but it was in Europe, precisely because of the sharing of discoveries among the various European nations, in their own vernaculars, that the scientific and industrial revolutions took off.) Interestingly, while the universality of science can be seen in the status of English today as its quasi-universal language, French and German, which in the nineteenth century were competitive with English in the production of scientific texts, are today becoming marginal (the same goes more so for Hungarian, Danish, Polish, and so on). The earlier contributions of French and German scientists, written in their respective languages, are of interest primarily to historians of science.

Damrosch's claim, that certain literary works are so “culture-bound that they can only be meaningful to a home-grown audience or to specialists in the area," points up the problem with "the European canon." For those who don't grow up reading works of European literature, the cultural history contained in those works is to a great extent inaccessible. Thus, the postcolonial criticism of Eurocentrism and of the role of the humanities in perpetuating it. Is cosmopolitanism, which Lützeler privileges, simply a happy term for wiping out real difference? For making us all alike? And European "continentalization" the first step in that process?

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