Fritz Strich on world literature

My essay on the above subject has just appeared in vol. 26 of Goethe Yearbook and is probably available at JStor for those who are interested. I have worked for a long time on this subject. Among the issues that interested me were the omission of Fritz Strich from the scholarship concerning world literature and the prevalence of an interpretation of world literature that has little to do with what Goethe had in mind when he began speaking on the subject in the 1820s. That said, it must be admitted that Goethe was breaking new ground. Strich also was breaking new ground when he began to write on world literature in the 1920s, and it may surprise Germanists in particular that Goethe und die Weltliteratur (1946) was the first comprehensive treatment of world literature to be written. Within a decade of that publication, the world literature "industry" began, although even the 1965 edition of Pyritz's Goethe bibliography still had no separate section on world literature.

It can't be said, of course, that Strich faithfully reproduces what Goethe may or may not have had in mind. Strick began his writing on world literature in the 1920s, when Germany was at a low point internationally, to put it mildly, and his writings were an attempt, I believe, to write Germany back into the historical continuity of European nations that was also to be seen in two almost contemporaneous studies: Erich Auerbach's Mimesis: the Representation of Reality in Western Literature and Ernst Robert Curtius's European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages. In Strich's treatment, world literature was a process leading to tolerance, amity among the nations, a felt humanity, and so on, and was grounded on the verifiable cross-fertilization of the European literary vernaculars since the Renaissance, with the various "national" literary idioms borrowing or passing on the distinctive features of their literary production. Thus, sonnets, for instance, originated in one country, but were passed on to others, with each becoming nationally inflected: compare the difference between those of Petrarch and Shakespeare, not to forget the vast production in the Baroque period in Germany.

It was the peaceful nature of this cultural contact, unlike the often warlike, cross-borders political relations, that suggested to Strich a "universal" spirit (Geist) absorbing all the individual national spirits and uniting the nations into a shared universal destiny. No doubt, it is this "spiritual" approach -- that of Geistesgeschichte -- that was already out of date when Goethe und die Weltliteratur appeared and that has led to undervaluation of Strich's role in scholarship. The orthodox view today of world literature seems to be "literature of the world," a marketplace..

While Strich was certainly correct about the literary cross-fertilization, there were other processes, of a material nature, that also began in the period of the Renaissance and that have indeed produced a common European -- or, better put, Western -- "spirit." I am speaking of trade and commerce, which, within a decade of the discovery of the New World, jump-started the material transformation of the various European countries. Locally produced inventions and technology crossed borders as well, spreading the findings, despite existing historical animosities, despite the attempts of governments to control the flow and making knowledge "proprietary." The result has been the spread of common institutions and a shared ethos concerning civil liberties, which, for those who share them, are universal values.

Picture credit: University of Bern

Europe and the world

Europe and the world

I have been working longer than is sane on an essay on Fritz Strich and Goethe's concept of world literature. Actually, not so much Goethe's concept but, rather, Strich's interpretation of that concept. Strich published in 1946 the first major study of the subject of world literature, Goethe und die Weltliteratur. Interestingly, in the century and a half after Goethe's death, despite practically every aspect of his life and work being investigated, his ideas on world literature stirred very little philological interest. Indeed, Hans Pyritz’s edition of the Goethe-Bibliographie, published in 1965, does not even devote a section to world literature. With the appearance of Strich's work in 1946, world literature scholarship took off.

The term "world literature," however, was already a buzzword by the end of the 19th century, but usually in the context of comparative literature or in reference to the great books of "the world" or to the circulation of books beyond their country of origin. The world literature publishing industry, as represented by anthologies and college textbooks, has likewise left the Goethean context far behind. The focus continues to be the "great books of the world," of all times and places. Thus, the Norton Anthology of World Literature includes (in volume 3), among others, the writings of Martin Luther, John Milton, The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes, and "Indian Poetry after Islam." This is very sloppy intellectual work. In Goethe's conception, world literature concerned the active and continuous exchange of and encounter with living literary works of other nations. They were something like news in a bottle that had been cast in the ocean and turned up on another shore, bringing us information about the ways and folksways of other peoples. The distinction between then and now, however, is that when one read books of other cultures in translation, we understood that they had once been in a particular native language, which, as John Noyes has written, also conveys a particular cultural history.

Map of European languages

But what if no written cultural history exists in your native language, say, if you grow up in the those parts of the world that, until recently, had no written language? If you want to enter the public sphere as a writer, today most likely you will learn to express yourself in a so-called "world language": English, Arabic, Chinese, French, or Spanish. To what extent do these language, as powerful and as extensive as they are, continue to express a cultural history? Historically and concurrently, the most privileged writers in this respect have certainly been European ones. In Goethe's time, they wrote in their native languages, transmitting a cultural history of "Europe," which forms the basis of what is called and often criticized as the humanities. Moreover, European writers still enjoy large “native” publics and, therefore, continue to write in their own languages: Italian, Danish, Hungarian, Polish, and so on.

The interest of Strich in this respect was his focus on national difference and national language, which was not quite Goethe's focus. Indeed, Goethe was turned toward the world, but his world was mostly a European one. As Strich wrote, already in an essay in 1930 on world literature, Europe is not the world.

Images: Clker art; Pinterest

Is "World Literature" relevant today? (part 1)

"Imperial Federation Map of the World"

The concept of world literature has been around going on two centuries — Goethe’s ruminations on the subject began in the late 1820s — yet one cannot help feeling that Goethe therewith released a demon into the world. There is a decided motility about the term: almost every writer on the subject begins by wrestling with a definition, as if to capture a moving target. I am reminded of the category of the sublime, which lay dormant for so many centuries: then, toward the end of the 17th century, the world felt a need for it and has henceforth also been struggling to define it. In both cases, one suspects that, had the terms not existed, they would have had to be invented. Despite the spread of the term “world literature” among comparatists in the 19th century, it is surprising how little philology there was among Germanists on the background or the sources of Goethe’s thinking before the appearance in 1946 of Strich’s Goethe und die Weltliteratur, even as seemingly every other aspect of his oeuvre was being subjected to examination.

Strich, however, had been working in this field since the 1920s: his first essay on world literature was published in 1928. His foray into the subject seems to have been precipitated by the vexed position of Germany among the nations after World War I. In the 1928 essay and in those that followed, he described the peaceful literary commerce among the various European vernaculars in the early modern period. This commerce had led to pan-European literary movements, ranging from the Renaissance to the Romantic period. So it is today, for instance, that "Baroque" art is recognizable (at least to scholars), whether it was created in Spain or in Germany. This cross-borders exchange — occurring even when Europe was wracked by the Thirty Years War — suggested to Strich the promise of world literature as articulated by Goethe in 1828:

If we have dared to announce a European, indeed a universal world literature, we do not mean that the various nations should take notice of one another and their various achievements.  In this sense, such a literature has already existed for some time and continues and renews itself more or less.  No! we mean rather that the living and ambitious literary artists [Literatoren] learn from one another and, through affection and common purpose, find themselves compelled to be convivially [gesellig] productive.

For Goethe the exchange of literary products, correspondence among authors of various nations (for instance, his own correspondence with Carlyle and other European writers), translations, and so on seemed to promise that the peoples of the world were in the process of becoming better disposed toward others. World literature as UNESCO avant la lettre.

This was also the message of Strich's Goethe and World Literature (English, 1949). In 1946, after two world wars, in which Germany’s international stock had reached its nadir, Strich still held that the goal of world literature was to unite all humans into what he called “einer übernationalen, allgemein menschlichen, humanen Kultur.” In the 1950s, however, as Europe came to terms with the world-wide legacy of colonialism and as the formerly colonized territories began to assert their own identities, Strich’s optimism was considered passé and his interpretation too “European.” Even as Goethe and World Literature unleashed a world literature industry, it was Erich Auerbach’s more pessimistic essay from 1952, lamenting what he saw as a growing world monoculture, that set the tone for much of what has followed.

Auerbach, who wrote only this single essay on world literature, has been for a number of years a touchstone for “postcolonial” scholarship on world literature. This is the result of the translation and publication of his essay in 1969 by Edward Said, for whom Auerbach was exemplary of a “critical consciousness” that did more “than strengthen those aspects of the culture that require mere affirmation and orthodox compliancy from its members,” that resisted “the kind of filiation that is representative of traditional literary production.” Writing in 1983, Said even claimed that Auerbach’s Mimesis was not simply — as it might appear to most readers — “a massive reaffirmation of the Western cultural tradition, but also a work built upon a critically important alienation from it.”

The postcolonial negation of allegiance, of filiation, of culturally transmitted values, i.e., of “Eurocentrism,” however, simply reiterates the process that made “the West” so powerful by the beginning of the 20th century, namely, the constant circulation of goods in the modern marketplace, which is not solely a matter of goods, of the everyday consumables of the market place. Such circulation demands erasure, the jettisoning of what was loved only yesterday in favor of new goods, among which can be included literary and critical movements and attitudes. The postindustrial world is just as impatient with filiation as was Edward Said. His critique of the European literary canon and its humanistic values reflects one of the most characteristic features of Western life of the past several centuries: the abrogation of the intellectual and cultural authority of the past, with the battle of ancients and moderns marking an early milestone. Rejection has been naturalized by the ideological discourse of progress.

The postcolonial critique is of course only one of many academic trends (Marxism, deconstruction, feminist studies, ad nauseum) that purport to tell us how bad and irrelevant “Western culture” is. And Western scholars today, especially in the U.S., lured by the latest fashions, have jumped on this bandwagon. One might suggest that the number of academic conferences, especially on an international level, from Angola to Manchester, validate Goethe’s concept of “fruitful communication.” Indeed, postcolonial scholarship has become a virtual cash cow, an opportunity for the like-minded to gather together.

I see I have not got to the question posed in the title of this post. Part 2 to follow. Stay tuned.

Image credits: World Literature 101; Repeating Islands; Postcolonial Networks

Fritz Strich and world literature, 4

The slogans “We Are All New Yorkers” or “We Are All Charlie” and so on after terrorist attacks, along with the candles and other public signs of mourning, have always made me uncomfortable. My discomfort has to do with the sadness that such expressions represent, whereas anger would seem more fitting. Yet we inhabit a civilized world, and one of the foundation blocks of a civilized world is restraint, along with tolerance, which commands us to repress a martial spirit: “War Is Not Good for Children and Other Living Things.” The enemies of civilization feel no such restraint: they send their children to war, hand out candies to them after successful attacks. And, of course, all around us, at the margins of the civilized world that we inhabit, bubble up anarchy, dissatisfaction, resentments.

As the above cartoon by Ali Dilem demonstrates, it is not just the traditional centers of civilization, “the West,” that are the targets of Islamic terrorists. Ankara, Kenya, Mali, any place with tendencies toward the Western way of life are on the hit list.

For those who are surprised to read of these sentiments in a post on Fritz Strich and world literature, allow me to expand.

The concept of world literature, which Goethe “birthed” in the 19th century, sums up the ideals of a civilized world. Strich took an idea that had been around for a century, namely, that the countries of Europe were manifesting similar tendencies in literature and the arts. They were all “trading” with one another, for instance, sharing literary idioms and forms and motifs. Thus, no European country escaped experiencing a Romantic movement. For Strich, this interchange was evidence of a Hegelian-like Spirit that was blending the different countries into a common humanity. No people is complete in itself, and, ultimately, this succession of styles, according to Strich, represents the striving of the human spirit, through the succeeding manifestations of national spirits, toward perfection of the human Urbild.

To a great extent, this process has indeed taken place in the West. Although we tend nowadays to avoid terms like “common humanity,” we respond similarly to terrorist attacks in other European cities. It could be us, after all. Thus, “Je suis Bruxelles.” In truth, Europeans and Americans are very much alike in their life styles and in their values. We have more in common with each other than we do with non-Westernized folks. Europe and its offshoots represent, to the greatest extent, a cultural product, one that has been achieved over many centuries, the result of intellectual and material commerce among the countries of Europe beginning in the early modern period. Strich’s description of the blending and sharing of literary and artistic styles exemplifies this coming together.

For Strich and the late-19th-century comparatists from whom he drew so much, the development of common cultural ideals was evidence of universal “progress,” but it was only universal to the nations that were connected and enriched through trade and commerce.

It is not surprising that Goethe linked the spread of "Humanität" (or the "European" spirit) with "Verkehr" (commerce; transport) and "Handel" (trade); he saw a connection between the free commerce in material goods and that in ideas ("mehr oder weniger freier geistiger Handelsverkehr," from his introduction to Carlyle's biography of Schiller). That Goethe might have believed this was the case should not be surprising. By the 1820s, Europe was enjoying the benefits of several centuries of growth in scientific and cultural knowledge and was progressing on a path of technological innovation from which it has not retreated. The intellectual exchange that produced these benefits was a facet of European life in which Goethe himself was an active participant. Moreover, international trade was acquainting Europeans with the products of other nations, making them in turn more "worldly." Such changes in material life, as with the exchange of intellectual and cultural products would, so Goethe believed, lead, if not to love, certainly to a tolerant, cosmopolitan, and less ethnocentric attitude among the nations.

John Gast, The Spirit of American Progress, 1832

These issues of material "Verkehr" and "Handel" are the most undeveloped aspects of Strich's work on world literature and of the preceding literary histories of Europe. Aside from a few sentences, his interest is almost totally devoted to the "geistiger Raum" created by world literature. Strich, like Brunetière, was an inheritor of a trend in Enlightenment thinking that viewed historical transformation, according to László Kontler, as "motivated by inner moral-spiritual enlightenment. Both as the medium and as the cause of such transformations, spontaneous intercourse in the socio-economic realm [took] second place.” Perhaps this neglect indicates a Christian substrate, but it shows the power of abstract ideals, especially since the Enlightenment. Therefore, Strich neglected the influence of the rise and fall of national economies not only on artistic production but also on the accompanying transformation of institutions that produced what we now recognize as liberal values, i.e., the Western way of life. In other words, tolerance is a byproduct of the wealth of nations.  Ideas only have real power to influence when they reflect material possibilities, and the emergence of the West and Western values coincided with the rise of the market economy by the late 17th century.

Yet, if Strich vastly underrated the material effects of trade, the language he used to describe the literary commerce are full of metaphors of movement. When he speaks (as mentioned in the previous post) of German 17th-century poetry as expressing a spirit of transience –– “die Klage um den jähen Wechsel aller Dinge” –– he is describing what was occurring on the ground in Europe in the 17th century.

By the 17th century, trade was producing both a movement of men (for the most part) and freeing up massive amounts of human potential, leading in turn to new goods and an acceleration in technological advances. For instance, because of overseas trade there was an increased need for metals –– for coins and for weapons. This led to a huge investments in mining, and the need to go deeper to extract metals required new technology. Among other inventions, the magnetic compass and the telescope expanded the sense of distance. And if poets are not quite the legislators of the world, they are often the first to put such changes into words. They responded, in Germany and elsewhere, many with trepidation, others with delight, to the heretofore-unperceived immensities of the universe and to the new status of the earth, no longer standing still with the planets revolving around it. The earth was in motion. "Bewegtheit" was indeed the driving "spirit" of this era. It was more the spirit of Adam Smith, however, than of Hegel.

Transience is a byproduct of the market: what we loved yesterday is replaced today in favor of new products, new values. It is unsettling, and it is no wonder that people all over the world, even within the West itself, are unhappy when the ground under their feet is constantly shifting. Progress is, indeed “veloziferisch.”

Fritz Strich and world literature, 3

 Goethe und die Weltliteratur appeared in 1946, the same year as Mimesis: Dargestellte Wirklicheit in der abendländischen Literatur, by Erich Auerbach (1892­–1957), and two years before Europäische Literatur und lateinisches Mittelalter, by Ernst Robert Curtius (1886–1956). Following on World War II, after which Germany’s international stock had reached its nadir, the three works indirectly addressed “the German problem.” Yet, at a moment when Europe seemed irrevocably sundered by perennial animosities, each insisted on the historical continuity and unity of European culture.

An early essay by Strich, a 1916 essay on German Baroque poetry, “Der lyrische Stil des 17. Jahrhunderts,” exemplifies this unity. This long essay is a detailed, example-rich analysis of how German poets created a national style from the imported alexandrine. It was by the naturalizing of a Romance-originated poetic style that German poets began to participate on equal footing in a European-wide style, “the Baroque.”

In 1916, of course, Germany was at  war with the rest of Europe, by the end of which Germany’s standing among the nations had undergone catastrophic decline. It must have been at this point that Strich embarked on what became his vocation, namely, the promoting of world literature as a form of national and international understanding. Thus, Goethe und die Weltliteratur had its genesis twenty years earlier, after the First World War. In a review of Goethe und die Weltliteratur in Publications of the English Goethe Society in 1948, L.A. Willoughby wrote that “English readers will feel a proprietary interest in this book, for its germs were planted in 1924 when Professor Strich delivered a series of lectures on this subject before the University of London.”

"Es ist der Geist, der sich den Körper baut"

Even though he was the first Goethe scholar to publish a major work on the subject, Strich's ideas on world literature were inspired by the works of scholars who already in the early 19th century, recognized that the countries of Europe were coming together in a kind of aesthetic cosmopolitanism. An indication of this coming together was the sharing across borders of literary and artistic phenomena: what began in one country — be it the sonnet, the alexendrine, the novel, or even such themes as adultery –– would be taken up in another country, so that one could speak of “literary movements” (e.g., Baroque, Neo-Classicism, and so on), even as each literary culture had its own “national” characteristics: for instance, you could not mistake the Spanish Baroque for the German.

"Bewegtheit" (Carracci, The Lamentation, 1582)

 For Strich, the literary interchange was a reflection of a profound process, namely, a universal spirit (“Geist”) traveling through history and uniting the different nations into shared amity and tolerance, a view that was at the heart of his interpretation of world literature. The spirit moves; it does not stand still; and Strich constantly uses nouns and verbs expressive of movement in describing the effect of the spirit on literary expression. To return to the 1916 essay on German Baroque poetry, he writes that the most frequent motif of 17th-century poetry is “die Klage um den jähen Wechsel aller Dinge, ... : daß alles auf Erden eitel ist, ein Schatten, ein Wind, ein Rauch, ein verklingender Ton, eine Welle. Man ist ein Ball, den das Verhängnis schlägt, ein Kahn auf dem empörten Meer, ein Rohr, das jeder Wind bewegt.”

He contrasts this “Bewegtheit” with the “epische Ruhe, Gegenständlichkeit und Gebundenheit” of  the poetry of the 16th century, as exemplified in the treatment of the death of Christ in a poem by Hans Sachs. (As in the painting at the left by Guido di Pietro, from 1420-23.) Paul Fleming, in contrast, transforms the event into an “epische[s] Geschehnis.” The principle of movement also characterizes the treatment of homely subjects, of ordinary life, because of the sense of the fleeting nature of all things, which produced a desire to capture an elusive moment. Thus, one reads of  “Als Flavia einsmahls an einem groben Sack arbeitete,” or “Als sie bei trübem Sturmwetter ihre Wäsche bleichete.”

While Strich's formalist approach to describe the “travel” of a literary style from one national literature to another is compelling in its wealth of stylistic detail, he does not offer an explanation for what produced the change in spirit from Hans Sachs to Paul Fleming, from timelessness to time. Of the Thirty Years’ War he writes only that it produced no heroic poetry. In retrospect that war has taken on large contours in explaining the 17th-century “fracturing of the world.” Yet, while Germany and Central Europe were certainly devastated, the fracturing was not restricted to that region. The travel of ideas and intellectual advancement did not require a war to leave behind the old hierarchies behind. The experience of transience expressed in the poetry, “den jähen Wechsel aller Dinge,” also replicated the rapidity with which material changes were transforming Europe by the 17th century.

In my next posts I will discuss the material changes that were giving rise to the idea of the progress of a universal spirit uniting the nations into a common humanity.

Picture credits: Luminous Dark Cloud; Metropolitan Museum of Art; Die Zeit

Fritz Strich and world literature, 2

Fritz Strich’s essays on world literature draw their inspiration from literary exchange among the European vernaculars in the early modern period. Already in the early 19th-century such writers as Friedrich Bouterwek (1766–1828) and the Schlegels had observed that the literary vernaculars, from the Renaissance on, had “traded” among themselves, successively manifesting the same styles (e.g., mannerist vs. classicist), genres (pastorals, tragedies, sonnets), themes, and so on, with local inflection.

Writing in the same vein was the French scholar Ferdinand Brunetière (1849–1906), who sketched the development of what he called "European literature," in particular the way in which the individual nations had developed a European literature on the soil of medieval Christianity and in particular antiquity, which he called "the master of Europe's mind and spirit." The great literatures of Europe developed successively (there are five in Brunetière’s scheme: first, the Italians, followed by the Spanish, then the French, the English, and finally the Germans), with one after another manifesting "what were its most national and particular aspects," and each literature contributing to "the movement of European thought."

European "thought" in this account is simply the literary blending, so to speak, of the literatures of five countries into a common European product: Italy, Spain, France, England, and Germany, each of which successively, beginning with the Italians (Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio), contributed to this "movement" of thought. In Italy's case, for instance, it was as transmitter of the tradition of antiquity, while among Spain's "truly great European creations" can be found the drama.
 

Ferdinand Brunetière

Brunetière's scheme is replicated by Strich in his writings on world literature. In fact, Strich utilizes the same schema, likewise positing that the dominance of one nation in this literary give-and-take occurred when its literature simultaneously manifested most strongly its own national individuality while preserving a maximum of the common European (i.e., classical and Christian) “spirit.” For instance, the sonnet began in Italy but rapidly made its way through all the lands of western Europe. Anyone who has studied art history recognizes that something similar can be seen in architectural styles: Romanesque, Gothic, and so on, which appear throughout Europe, but each manifesting individual “national” characteristics.

What differentiates Strich’s interpretation of this literary blending from the Schlegels and Brunetière is the motive force that propels the integration.  This motive force is a progressive spirit of history, expressed via a dialectical movement of the spirit of different nationalities. Here is Strich's explanation of how the movement occurs, from the opening of his 1922 study Deutsche Klassik und Romantik:

 “Das große Mysterium der Wiedergeburt, der Renaissance der Stile, muß als innersten Wesenskern eine ewig lebendige Gegenwärtigkeit geistiger Strömungen haben. Es muß in der Geschichte des Geistes etwas geben, was nicht vergeht, sondern immer zur Auferstehung bereit ist, wenn es von brüderlichem Geiste gerufen wird, etwas, das so notwendig menschlich, so ewig gültig sein muß, daß es immer wieder aus dem Strom der Zeiten aufzutauchen vermag.”

To the greatest extent, Strich's interpretation of world literature takes the "Humanitätspathos" of many of Goethe’s utterances to new levels. In 1946, after two world wars, in which Germany’s international stock had reached its nadir, Strich held that the progressive spirit expressed by the idea of world literature was to unite all humans into what he called, in Goethe und die Weltliteratur, "einer übernationalen, allgemein menschlichen, humanen Kultur.”

The process began in Europe, but it would soon encompass the earth. As Strich wrote: “Eine europäische Literatur, also eine zwischen den Literaturen Europas und zwischen den europäischen Völkern vermittelnde und ausgetauschte Literatur, ist die erste Stufe der Weltliteratur, die sich, von hier aus beginnend, zu einem immer weiter um sich greifenden und endlich die Welt umfassenden Komplex erweitern wird.”

This optimistic vision, with its universalist goal, has in the meantime been stained with the epithet of "Eurocentrism," and Europe and its offshoots now stand accused, like monarchs of old, of monopolistic behavior, while its universal values are accused of being an ideological cover for power and for the exploitation by Europeans of the non-European world. In succeeding posts, I will describe how Strich’s earliest essays on world literature shed light on the issue of Eurocentrism.

Fritz Strich and world literature, 1

 Over the years I have posted often on world literature and on Fritz Strich. (For anyone who is interested in these posts, go to the small search window at the top left and add the search term.) My interest in Strich (1882–1963) has to do with the odd position he occupies in world literature scholarship. Or perhaps it is the position he does not occupy. One invariably encounters his name, and the status of his 1946 study Goethe und die Weltliteratur is always invoked. John Pizer has written, for instance, that it is "still the most important monograph on the subject." According to Theo D'haen, Strich is "one of the most perceptive and thorough commentators on Goethe and world literature." Yet if one examines recent historical overviews of world literature, for instance, The Routledge Companion to World Literature (2012), one finds chapters on Hugo Meltzl, Georg Brandes, Rabindranath Tagore, Albert Guérard, Erich Auerbach, Claudio Guillén, Edward Said, Pascale Casanova, Franco Moretti -- but none on Strich.

It might seem that Strich's special contribution to the field was simply to have compiled the scattered Goethean uses of the term “world literature,” twenty-one in total, which appear before the endnotes of Goethe und die Weltliteratur. These have been the starting point for many a work that shows otherwise no extensive knowledge of Goethe's utterances or thinking.

This is a strange fate for Strich, whom Anne Bohnenkamp describes as "der Verfasser der bis heute grundlegenden Monographie zum Thema [Weltliteratur].” To show how foundational this work was, and to indicate the effect of historical conditions on scholarship, let me mention what is the only other significant contribution to theorizing world literature before Goethe und die Weltliteratur. This is a long 1930 article by Victor Klemperer entitled “Weltliteratur und europäische Literatur,” which contains many of the same observations found in articles on world literature written by Strich before 1946. Within four years, however, Klemperer was removed from his teaching position in Dresden, denied access to libraries throughout the National Socialist era, and did not return to the subject after World War II. By 1930, Strich had left Munich and relocated to Switzerland, to Berne, and had the field to himself.

Strich wrote three essays of which the titles refer specifically to world literature (in 1928, 1930, and 1932), along with a number of other essays that reflect the same concerns that will be voiced in all of his succeeding work, namely, the historical exchange among the European literary vernaculars since the Renaissance and the hopeful prospect of amity among the peoples of the world that such an exchange seemed to promise and that for Strich was the central element of Goethe’s concept of world literature.

Moreover, Goethe und die Weltliteratur inaugurated a new field of scholarship, namely, that of “world literature,” even if Strich himself has been left aside in the process. Bohnenkamp is correct to say that it was “grundlegend.”

It is true that Goethe's concept, already in his lifetime and immediately thereafter, was a subject of much interest. But, as Peter Goßens has written (Weltliteratur. Modelle transnationaler Literaturwahrnehmung im 19. Jahrhundert, Stuttgart, 2011) of this afterlife: “Interessant ist dabei, daß und wie sich der Begriff allmählich aus dem direkten Goetheumfeld entfernt und sein Eigenleben in anderen transnational orientierten Kontexten beginnt.” Despite the spread of the term, especially among late-19th-century comparatists, it is surprising how little philology there was on the background or origin of Goethe’s thinking before the appearance of Goethe und die Weltliteratur, even as seemingly every other aspect of his oeuvre was being subjected to examination. After its appearance, however, studies of world literature soon followed, first among them the publication of the Aspen symposium of 1949.

Indeed, I hazard to assert that the initial reception of Strich’s study was a boon to Goethe’s reception and reputation after World War II. Yet it is Strict’s contemporary Erich Auerbach (1892­–1957), who published a single essay on world literature, in a 1952 festschrift for Strich, who is increasingly a touchstone for world literature scholarship.

The following posts will be devoted to this issue of Strich’s absence from the scholarship. It has of course much to do with his interpretation of world literature, which takes the “Humanitätspathos” of many of Goethe’s utterances to new levels. As I will discuss, however, his interpretation sheds light on the issue of “Eurocentrism” and its universalist assumptions.

Picture credits: Dreamstime; Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte

"Against World Literature"

Collage by Maureen Mullarkey

I am finishing up my essay on Fritz Strich –– oh, how bedeviling are the footnotes! I find myself in opposition to almost every scholarly approach to world literature since it has become such a scholarly industry –– since Strich's Goethe und die Weltliteratur, first published in 1946. The term was of course in circulation already in Goethe's lifetime, as it first appeared in 1827 in volume 6, no. 1 of Ueber Kunst und Altertum. Peter Goßens' study (discussed here by me) has detailed the afterlife of the concept in the period immediately after Goethe's death. For instance, its political and ethical ramifications were seized on by Karl August Varnhagen and other Goethe admirers in Varnhagen’s Berlin circle, among whom the ideas of the followers of Saint-Simon had taken root. Goßens quotes Cyrus Hamlin on Varnhagen’s reading of the Wanderjahre as “Gebrauchsanweisung für die zukünftige soziale Ordnung Europas in 19. Jahrhundert,” thereby forming, in Goßens’ words, “der Grundstein einer sozialistischen Goethedeutung.”

Marx and Engels blew that interpretation out of the water, and after 1848 "world literature" came more and more to be identified with comparative literature, which began to establish itself as a scholarly discipline. Not that everyone agreed with that conflation, and in the decades before the appearance of Goethe und die Weltliteratur there occasionally appeared an essay or a book that sought to rescue the concept from the comparatists.

Since at least the 1980s, the concept of "Eurocentrism" has been intimately linked to the world literature industry. It is true that Europe and its offshoots have dominated the rest of the world in economic terms, to the extent of producing inequalities in respect of “marginalized peripheries.” (That's from Samir Amin, the guy who invented the term "Eurocentrism.") And in a burst of 19th-century overreach, they sought to "export" their institutions to non-Europe, with not such great results. In my essay on Strich, however, I seek to distinguish "Europe" as an economic product from "European" literature. The former is in about "progress," which means rejecting what was loved only yesterday. In non-material terms, this has given rise to one of the most characteristic features of Western life of the past several centuries, namely, the rejection of the intellectual and cultural authority of the past (the Battle of Ancients and Moderns marking an early milestone in this rejection).

"Using Literature to Teach Global Citizenship"

The provocative title of this post is also that of a new book by NYU professor of French Emily Apter. The TLS reviewed the book, providing a clear summary of Apter's critique: world literature, according to Apter (but in the words of the reviewer), is "the handmaiden to a late-capitalist moment that transforms all cultural idioms into easily digestible products for an expanded global marketplace." I agree with this sentiment. One only has to consider those ghastly anthologies of world literature foisted off on high school and college students. Not to mention the cloying, dumbed-down multicultural programs. Apter's fight "against" world literature seems to concern the issue of "untranslatability" (as per her subtitle). I say "seems," for frankly it is hard to know what she is talking about. The following is exemplary of her terrible writing:

"[I]n translation studies, the limits of sayability and expressibility are increasingly a focus, conjugating logic and philology, with the latter understood in Werner Hamacher's ascription as an 'inclination' (or disinclination) to that which is 'said and not said.'"

Why the weird use of "conjugate" and "ascription" here? And how does the second half of the sentence follow on the first? And why are the writings of full professors so offputting?

Proudhon and His Children by Gustave Courbet (1853)

It strikes me that Apter is a 21st-century version of the proto-socialist enthusiasts of Goethe's day. Her wish, like those proto-socialists, is the formation of non-national, emancipated, cosmopolitan literary communities. But that is exactly what the market creates. One only has to read a contemporary English-language novel coming out of India or Pakistan or an African country to understand that the writers of these novels are repeating the experience of Europe, namely, rejecting their own traditions, literary and otherwise, and becoming "cosmopolitan." Such has been the arc of the novel in the West, namely, to portray individuals contending with a non-traditional world, one in which the old sureties have been destroyed in the name of "progress."

I am beginning to find something weird about the world literature movement. Besides the endless numbers of conferences, I just came across an announcement for a "Four-Day Vacation School" on the topic of "World Literature: Theories, Practice, Pegagogy." Held in September at the University of Warwick, it was sponsored by "the Connecting Cultures Grp." Need I say more?

Picture credit: Vamos a leer; Encyclopedia Britannica

Fritz Strich at the MLA

Dividing up the world

I am flying to Chicago tomorrow (ugh!) for the MLA convention. I suppose my opinion of the generality of the convention will not surprise anyone reading this post. I had agreed to be on a panel on world literature early last year. When I received the convention program in the fall, however, I was shocked at the mediocrity of the panels. I haven't been a member of the MLA for over a decade, but when I would attend conventions previously there were always a number of panels I looked forward to attending, often conflicting time-wise with other panels. I will of course go to hear Birgit Tautz and John Noyes (who, by the way, is chairing the world literature panel in which I am presenting), but there is very little serious 18th-century presence, German or otherwise. Again, readers will surely know what I mean.

Kvetching aside, Fritz Strich is going to make his Chicago debut. Anyone who does research on world literature invariably comes across his name. The status of his 1946 study Goethe und die Weltliteratur is always invoked. John Pizer writes, for instance, that it is "still the most important monograph on the subject."  Yet if you look at historical overviews of world literature, especially recent ones, you will find him overlooked and, indeed, dismissed. This dismissal stems from what is considered the Eurocentric bias of his interpretation of world literature.

Well, I am going to take that issue head-on. Stay tuned.

Picture credit: The Disorder of Things

European literature vs. world literature

"Heroes" of European literature

Reading these early comparatists (see previous post, among others) gives me a handle not only on the sources of Fritz Strich's study but also on what Goethe had in mind, the latter being endlessly dissected. For the moment I will remain with the former.

I have mentioned elsewhere that Strich generally does not cite his sources. It is only in the 1957 edition of Goethe and World Literature that he includes a true bibliography. I have gone through many of the studies contained there and have begun to get a feeling for why he embarked on a field that, until Goethe and World Literature, was not a scholarly field as such. In other words, Strich inaugurated the modern study of the subject.

I have discovered in the articles by the early comparatists statements that Strich takes up, if not word for word, certainly concept for concept. Yet, one hesitates to call this plagiarism, as is shown, for instance, in an article by Joseph Texte (on whom I have also posted). According to Texte, in "The Comparative History of Literature" (translated from Revue de philologie francaise et de la litterature [1896]), the requirement for literary production historically (let us say up to the mid-18th century) was precisely based on imitation of ancient literature. In turn, criticism likewise modeled itself on the relationship between work and its source. Thus, literature was plagiaristic, and criticism documented this reliance on models.

The "modern period," as Texte writes, presents a different story; modern writers are indeed more "scrupulous."  Yet, "in imitating more freely, they do not imitate less; moreover, how can one determine their originality if one does not begin by comparing them with their contemporaries, with those by whom every writer, no matter how independent ... is influenced?" Texte is arguing for the relevance of the new field of comparative literature, one of the aims of which is the discovery of such "intellectual relationships." He mentions Taine and his "followers" who would remove the aesthetic element from literary study, by extricating "the personal from each work and the original from each literature."

Tongue twisters

Texte is very brilliant, yet his article made me aware of a problem with this idea of intellectual relationships. While it is a truism, long recognized before the 19th-century comparatists (see Daniel Morhof), that writers in the Western literary tradition before the 18th century were either influenced or consciously modeled their works on earlier models, they were not writing "nationally," even while writing in their respective vernaculars. The formation of "political nationalities" in the modern period, however, especially since "the Revolution," has likewise led to the formation of "intellectual nationalities." As Texte writes: "modern nations did not become consciously aware of their intellectual personality apart from antique imitation until a relatively recent epoch." Thus, the development of comparative literature seems to have been a rearguard action to maintain a humanistic conception of "literature," based on a common intellectual heritage, even as the study of literature in the universities in the 19th century was herding literary study into departments based on "national language."

Picture source: Europe Is Not Dead

Goethe on "European literature"

"Deluge" by GC Myers

An article from 1900 by Ferdinand Brunetière, entitled "European Literature," provides much insight concerning both Goethe's concept of world literature and Fritz Strich's interpretation of that concept.

In 1900 the discipline of comparative literature was still defining itself as a field, and Brunetière, a member of the French Academy and editor of the Revue des deux mondes, sought to set out the scope of comparative literature. In the article he applies evolutionary theories to the study of literature, in particular the development of what he calls European literature, which is the transmitter of "European thought." This latter, however, is not "Western" or "universal": there are no transcendental implications in Brunetière's account, no suggestion that European "thought" constitutes a supranational spirit.

His subject is the aims of comparative literature as a subject of study, and thus he speaks solely of literature, because literature is the vehicle which expresses the "national" or "tribal" spirit of a people.  European "thought" in this account is simply the literary blending, so to speak, of the literature of five countries into a common European product: Italy, Spain, France, England, and Germany, each of which successively, beginning with the Italians (Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio), contributed to this "movement" of thought. In Italy's case, for instance, it was as transmitter of the tradition of antiquity, while among Spain's "truly great European creations" can be found the drama. Spain was the home of Seneca, and even though the work of Shakespeare and Ben Jonson preceded Le Cid, English drama of the 16th century became "truly European" by way of Spanish genius!

None of the "European" products sprang from its own soil ex nihilo. In this movement, some national manifestations remain purely "local" -- this is especially the case with Spain -- and do not become part of European literature. Brunetière is thinking solely of the "comparative" relations among literatures, of what one "national" literature takes from another and develops. His test case is the novel, which expresses the most "English characteristics" in Smollet, Richardson, and Fielding; the origins of the genre, however, can be traced back to the Princess de Clèves and, further, to Diana enamorada by Jorge de Montemayor. 

Brunetière's scheme of progressive development is replicated by Strich in his writings on world literature. In fact, Strich utilizes the same schema, likewise positing that the dominance of one nation in this literary give-and-take occurred when its literature simultaneously manifested most strongly its own national individuality while preserving a maximum of the common European (i.e., classical and Christian) "spirit." Strich likewise affirms Brunetiere's contention that that the knowledge of other literatures sharpens in us an understanding of the most national characteristics of our great writers. Brunetière writes: "we are defined only by comparing ourselves to others; we do not know ourselves only when we know only ourselves."

Soviet-Ukranian amity ca. 1921

 The problem with Brunetière's scheme, of course, is that "national" literature was becoming increasingly irrelevant by the time he wrote. (Which did not prevent the formation, in the 19th century, of university departments of literature along national lines.) In fact, national literature would seem to have been relevant only in the early 19th century: though it may have been an "ideological" construct, it nevertheless allowed a way of talking about literary manifestations in that period. Literature, by the late 19th century, however, was jettisoning its national or local character. Tellingly, Brunetière did not extend his survey to the writings of what he called "the extreme North," i.e., Scandinavia and Russia. As he wrote, they had only recently entered, "to use a diplomatic expression, into the theater of European literature." Though he admires Anna Karenina and The Wild Duck, he does not see what is specifically "Russian" or "Norwegian" in either. We seem to be on the verge of the "internationalization" of literature, in particular of the novel.

Strich, writing some decades later, would have been aware of this internationalization. It was this process, I think, that fueled Goethe's conception of world literature. By the late 1820s, he no longer saw literature as simply the expression of the literary or aesthetic; literature had a larger task, to contribute to a spirit of like-mindedness and political tolerance among nations. The divestiture of national animosities was occurring, as he wrote, through commerce and trade, one of the products of which was literature. He thought, of course, that it was the writings of eminent and like-minded writers of the age -- like himself! -- which would further this process. He did not regard the increasing deluge of popular writing as edifying.

More anon.

Was Goethe a comparatist avant la lettre?

Ninja Archipelago Map

The above question is prompted by an article from 1896 by Louis Paul Betz, "Critical Observations on the Nature, Function, and Meaning of Comparative Literary History" (originally appearing in Z. f. franz. Sprache u. Litteratur, vol. 18, no. 3, pp. 141-56). I will be on a panel at the MLA in Chicago in January, opining on the "prehistory" of Fritz Strich's study Goethe und die Weltliteratur. That prehistory includes the work of late 19th- and early 20th-century scholars in the relatively new field of comparative literature.

Betz became the first lecturer in comparative literature and Zurich University in 1896. His essay surveys various scholars' views of the aims and purposes of comparative literature and comparative literary history. He frequently evokes Goethe and also advances points that can be found in Strich's work on world literature. For instance, the French comparatist Brunetière, Betz writes, expressed the "essence" of comparative literary history by observing that it "look[s] on the whole from above, free from national prejudice, [observing] the constant changes, the continuous giving and taking of ideas and forms. As world literature it goes hand in hand with the national history of literature toward a common goal: the investigation of the development of the human spirit."

The lessening of national prejudice is of course alluded to by Goethe in his remarks on world literature, but the part about the development of the human spirit through the history of literary relations is purely Strich.

As for Germany, Betz traces the development of "comparative literary history" there to Daniel Georg Morhof's 1684 study Von der teutschen Poeterey Ursprung und Fortgang, in which Morhof wrote as follows: "We intend to discuss the origin and development of German poetry, and in order to do so most thoroughly we will discuss first the rhymed poetry of other peoples, so that we may discover whether it originated with them before it did with us." Betz goes on to mention Gottsched (on the history of European drama), Lessing, Herder, and Schiller, and adds that "Goethe always considered the individual literatures comparatively in the context of the general development of literature."

One author Betz mentions is Otto Weddingen, who published a small volume with the instructive title Geschichte der Einwirkungen der deutschen Literatur, which seems to have taken its inspiration from something Goethe wrote in Kunst und Altertum (vol. 6, pt. 1, 1827), namely, that German literature had begun to take an honorable place literarily among the nations. I downloaded Weddington's book, which was written in 1881, thus a decade after the Prussian victory over the French. Weddington is similarly triumphant throughout. After surveying the influence of German on western and eastern European authors (as far afield as Bulgaria and Hungry), he has a remarkable conclusion:

Es ist ein schönes Bild, welches sich dem Auge darbietet; ein Gefühl reinster Wonne beschleicht uns bei der Wahrhehmung, dass Deutschlands Litteratur überall befruchtend and befördernd gewirkt hat, dass es Deutschlands Mission im 19. Jahrhundert war und, so Gott will, bis in die spätesten Tage seiner Existenz bleiben wird, das Licht seiner Kultur nach allen Seiten hin auszustrahlen.

Of course, comparative literature was not an academic discipline before the late 19th century, so Goethe can, at most, only be part of the "prehistory" of that discipline. Goethe's importance for comparative literature, however, is of another sort. Thus, Betz writes that Goethe "summarized the great significance of a comparative world literature [my italics] in ... two terms: mediation between nations and their mutual acceptance." Goethe was rather cautious about these two factors. Betz, however (and, it must be said, Strich in essays from the 1920s on world literature), draws a more grandiose vision: "Every new discovery in the area of the constant relationship between civilized peoples constitutes not only a new achievement of scholarship but also a 'building block of the future edifice of world peace.'" (I believe Betz is quoting Weddington here, but like many scholars of this period he neglects to add his source.) In conclusion, Betz writes:

Through comparison we arrive most clearly and surely at a knowledge of the peculiarities of an individual literature. However, we thus see man also in his universality. In the Germanic literatures he emerges with the same passions, virtues, and vices as in Romance literatures; on every page the unity and mutual dependence of all nations is revealed. ... Comparative literary history corrects individual and national one-sidedness, the dangerous enemy of modern civilization.

How much responsibility Goethe bears!

World literature and communications

For ages now I have been questioning the use of the word "progress" in the sense of moral improvement. It is true that our ethical sphere has expanded over the past two centuries (abolition of slavery, emancipation of women), but I am troubled by our tendency to regard such "advances" as the outcome of our moral superiority over previous generations, even sometimes the immediate past. In the 18th century, the philosophes censured the religious and social institutions of the past because of the latter's imposition of what the philosophes saw as backwardness. We have moved far beyond the 18th century, however, and it seems that every week I come across a review or an article in which the 1950s is described as an age of "repression." We are all moving "forward," thus Vorwärts.

My contention is that all of this progress has been propelled by mundane material factors, carried by the explosion of industry and technology in the early modern period. World commerce and trade multiplied the objects of fashion and in our households to such an extent that we became "cosmopolitan" in ways of life and standards of living. Something similar took place in the cultural sphere. Despite the historical rivalries between the countries of Europe, each began to assimilate some flavor of the culture of the others. As Joseph Texte wrote in Rousseau and the Cosmopolitan Spirit in Literature, the "classical spirit" of French literature absorbed Nordic input from England and Germany.

Commerce doesn't stay with the same old same old. Some new item of trade is always required to lure consumers. Novelty is thus the engine of capitalism. Our attitudes and values travel the same path, as we exchange old ones for new, more enlightened ones. To take an example from my own lifetime. Back in the 1950s, one spoke of divorce as causing a "broken home." Many decades down the road, it turns out that we were living on the cusp of a profound change in family relations, indeed on the cusp of "single-parent households."

Kant saw in cosmopolitanism a requisite for universal peace among nations. Peace, however, requires a lack of competition, which seems hardly compatible with capitalism and the constant production of novelty. Hegel gave a spiritual spin on this materialistic process, and it was left to others to change what Hannah Arendt has called "the interpretation of history into the making of history," e.g., Karl Marx. Together with Goethe's pronouncements on the subject, Fritz Strich described world literature in terms of a dialectical movement of the spirit of different nationalities.

Goethe seems much more modest in his thoughts on world literature. I can't help thinking that he somehow envisioned the development of communications technologies, although in his life only the semaphore (from 1790; it must have played a role in the military skirmishes between the French and the allied forces that Goethe observed first hand) showed the possibility of almost-simultaneous communication over long distances. Of course, he did not propose effacing the individual character of "peoples" or nations into even a "European spirit." World literature is thus an advanced form of "communications" technology. I wonder what his reaction would be to our contemporary modes of communication.

Picture credits: Luctor et emergo; Majstersztyk

World literature again

Colbert Presenting the Members of the French Academy to the King in 1667

I am jumping back into world literature, after so much time away in the realm of utopia, especially as I am scheduled to give a paper on it on January 11 at the MLA in Chicago. In truth, utopia and world literature are not that far apart in the realm of ideas: both are proposals to create more harmony  and decrease animosities among peoples. Utopia, however, would halt the process of change, while world literature is about change and communication. It decidedly is not, as David Damrosch contends in , about great works of literature, those that have "an exceptional ability to transcend the boundaries of the culture that produces it." Thus, Homer and Sophocles, alongside the Kalidasa and The Tale of the Genji in "world literature" surveys.  Goethe's comments on world literature are not copious, but in none of them does he designate a particular work as a work of world literature.

A term that crops up frequently in my research in this connection is "cosmopolitanism." A couple of days ago I was taken aback when I came across a book from 1899 entitled Rousseau and the Cosmopolitan Spirit in Literature. This concept is not one I associate with Rousseau, and in fact I wrote a post on this subject earlier this year. Rousseau, as I wrote, loathed the very idea of cosmopolitanism, asserting that Germans, French, English, and so on all had the same taste and manners: they had become "Europeans."

The book, as I discovered, uses "cosmopolitan" in a different sense. It is by Joseph Texte, who was a professor of comparative literature at Lyon. For Texte, the "cosmopolitan spirit in literature" was the result of the embrace of the English canons of art by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. La nouvelle Heloise  abandoned the normative classical ideals of the French Academy and introduced the more "barbarian" (in the view of the French) values of English literature, especially as seen in the homely, realist conventions of Samuel Richardson's novels.  This opened the floodgates to the reception of the "Nordic" spirit: The new content entering French literature by the 19th century was that of imagination and sensibility," definitely not a French product; they were of a northern cast and infused, as Madame de Staël expressed it, with "foreign vigour." The French developed an appetite for the foreign as a consequence of exposure to "northern" writers.

Madame de Staël by François Gerard (ca. 1810)

Texte defends his use of such racial categories. Since Taine, "the successor of Madame de Stael," the study of literature has become an "ethnological problem." What, after all, he asks, is an individual without his environment? "Dante without Italy? Could the works written in Latin be attributed to the Arabians or Chinese? Could the Alhambra be the work of the architect of the Parthenon? Each nation utters a portion of the 'interminable discourse' (Vigny) delivered by humanity." The discourse, he says, is interminable, but the nations have been participating in it for only a few centuries. He goes on to write something that is very redolent of Fritz Strich:

"'For the past eight or ten centuries there has been, in a sense, a traffic or interchange of ideas from one end of Europe to the other, so that Germany has been nourishing itself upon French thought, England upon German thought, Spain upon Italian thought, and each of these nations successively upon the thought of all the rest." 

Since my current work concerns the origins of Fritz Strich's views on Goethe and world literature, this book by Texte would seem to be part of these origins. Texte in his introduction thanks as his mentor Ferdinand Brunetière, whom I have already alluded to in an earlier presentation on this subject: In a long article in 1900,  Brunetière sketched the development of what he called "European literature," in particular the way in which the individual nations had developed a European literature on the soil of medieval Christianity and in particular antiquity, which he called "the master of Europe's mind and spirit." The great literatures of Europe developed successively (there are five: first, the Italians, followed by the Spanish, then the French, the English, and finally the Germans), with one after another manifesting "what were its most national and particular aspects," and each literature contributing to "the movement of European thought."