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

World Literature and "Universal Language"

Arashi Beach, Aruba

Minae Mizumura, in The Fall of Language in the Age of English, makes the argument that if one is to enter the world of learning, one must be able to read the “universal language,” for it is only, as she writes, “in the single universal language … that knowledge is best pursued.” (Italics in the original.) In the West, that language was for a time Latin, to which Greek was added during the Renaissance, but the overwhelming importance of Latin as the language of learning is indicated by the fact that all learned men wrote in it. Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Newton, all lived in different regions of Europe, and their work traveled from one region to another over two centuries, thanks solely to Latin, the language in which they wrote. Something similar happened in the humanities: Erasmus, though born in Holland, traveled all over Europe. Others who wrote in Latin include Thomas More, Martin Luther, Thomas Hobbes, Baruch Spinoza, and Leibniz. It turned out to be “economical” to write in a universal language.

These writings in Latin and Greek constituted "universal libraries." For a while the two classical libraries remained at the top in prestige; they possessed, after all, in quantity and quality, the greatest accumulation of knowledge. In time, texts in the classical languages were “steadily transferred to local libraries,” to vernacular languages, which eventually caught up and surpassed the classics in the accumulation of “universally applicable knowledge.”

If it is more “economical” to write in a single universal language, how is it possible, asks Mizumura, to pursue knowledge in disparate languages, as happened in Europe beginning in the 18th century, when national languages came into their own? Major writers of the Enlightenment — John Locke, David Hume, Adam Smith, Montesquieu, Kant, to name a few — wrote their most important works, after all, in their own languages. She finds that Europeans were able to “ to purse knowledge efficiently even when national languages replaced Latin as a tool for learning.” The reason: the pursuit of knowledge in Europe was carried out by people who shared a common cultural and religious history, not to forget that they were also strongly influenced by the abstract concepts of Latin and Greek learning. I would only add that it is not paradoxical that they wrote in a national language, and still gave birth to “universal” concepts and values.

Intellectuals did not only read books written in their own language. They “frequented” other national libraries, and many continued to have personal interactions across Europe. National languages thus functioned as universal languages and as national languages in their regions. In time, however, three languages — French, English, and German — became the main media of exchange, with works of “less major” languages translated into these three and thereby receiving a wider audience. She cites the example of Kierkegaard, who could have written in German, but he chose Danish in which to write his critique of Hegelian philosophy. It was, later, through posthumously published German translations, that his work became more widely known.

Something of the crucial importance of French, English, and German as “universal languages” in the distribution of knowledge can be see in The Magic Mountain. As I mentioned in my previous post, I am reading the novel during my stay in Aruba. In the chapter “Research,” Hans Castorp, to while away the hours shivering on his balcony under his camel-hair blankets, has purchased a number of books on anatomy, physiology, and biology. They are written, as Mann notes, in German, French, and English.

As Mizumura writes (thus alluding to the title of her book), this “tripolar system” fell apart in the course of the  20th century. Increasingly, “the world” was no longer represented by the West. Non-Western intellectuals began to enter the world of learning, and if their works were to attain wide distribution, to enter into “the universal library,” then they, too, had to write in the universal language, namely, English,  “the language that circulates most widely.”

World literature and the "sick, sad world"

Returning to the subject of my previous post, I do agree with critics of world literature when they speak of the "entrepreneurial, bulimic drive to anthologize and curricularize the world's cultural resources." That quote is from a review by Gloria Fisk of Emily Apter's book Against World Literature. Apter's "beef" seems to be with the idea that such anthologies assume that literature is "translatable," whereas a translation of, say, Dante's Commedia, is in no way commensurate with the original. Duh!

Apter's argument, as per the n+1 critics mentioned in the previous post, is a critique of the nexus between world literature and the economic processes of globalization. The anthologies thus obscure what Fisk calls the "extra-literary implications" of world literature, i.e., the links between "the commercial, the literary, and the curricular." Again, duh!

Paris on a Rainy Day, by Gustave Caillebotte (1877)

These critics are belatedly proclaiming what Pascale Casanova already laid out in wonderful detail in The World Republic of Letters, in particular, that literatures existing on the margins, if they are to become commercially successful, follow the trends set by the center. Casanova discussed the way that literary reputation in the 19th century followed what had been blessed with success in Paris. (For a Frenchman, France is still the center of the world.) An example in our present time would be Salman Rushdie, who is probably more popular in the West than in India. Rushdie's subject, at least in Midnight's Children, was the effect of the processes, first unleashed in the European world, that have undermined and transformed the traditional order of society. Those processes have been market-driven. We live in a capitalist world, and it is not surprising that literary "products" are marketed the same way as other products in the marketplace. And that there is competition.

If we wish to preserve literature, to set it apart from transient market products, we must insist that the literary heritage preserves "values" that are worth preserving. Those works that we consider great are foundational to civilization. The past was never a golden age, but in the long stretch of history, certain values have been transmitted, even during the most terrible cataclysms. Their survival suggests that they are essential to the human condition and, indeed, to the continuance of civilization: love of family, sacrifice for others, courage, self-discipline, self-reliance, inner cultivation, patriotism. Aristotle summed them all up long ago, and no one has improved on them. (To judge by this world literature reader for 10th-graders, these anthologies are introducing students to these values.)

Antigone and the body of Polynices

As Marilynne Robinson writes in her recent collection of essays, "The great truth that is too often forgotten is that it is in the nature of people to do good to one another." But what if such goodness is in conflict with other values? Thus, a major preoccupation of the Western literary tradition, since Sophocles and the Old Testament, has been what the Marxist critic Georg Lukács called the breach between inner and outer worlds. Antigone and Oedipus may have had fewer distractions, but the condition of the individual under advanced capitalism, despite a panoply of choices, is in essence the same. When push comes to shove, one is often still faced with choosing between incompatible alternatives, between what we love or desire and what we are required to do. The world, it seems, has always been a "sick, sad place," one in which literature and art recall us to our better selves.

And what has been the academic response to this inheritance? An attack on the literary patrimony, which has been rechristened as "patriarchy." It is not only "capitalist structures" (as Fisk writes) that inflict "violence" on the world; violence is inflicted daily on our own literary and, indeed, cultural inheritance in college classrooms.

"Die ganze Kunst als ein Lebendiges"

The above quote is from Goethe's essay on Winckelmann. Every morning I try to read something of Goethe's that doesn't necessarily have to do with the subject I am currently at work on, right now world literature. Yet I always seem to see connections. The section of the essay in which the above quote appears is headed "Mengs," in which the German artist makes the newly arrived Winckelman conversant with the things that deserved his attention in Rome. This leads Goethe to discourse on the history of art.

The Roman historian Vellejus Paterculus (b. ca. 19 B.C.), he writes, had observed the "rise and decline" of the arts and noticed that they could maintain their highest excellence only for a short while before declining. Goethe goes on to say that it was not possible for Vellejus to recognize the arts as living ("als ein Lebendiges") and, like every other organic being, having an indeterminate origin, a slow period of growth, a radiant moment of perfection (Vollendung), and a stepwise descent from this height. From Vellejus Goethe moves on to a long quotation from Quintilian describing the arc of Greek genius, from Polygnotos, Zeuxis, and Parrhasius to Polykletos, Lysippus, and Praxiteles.

For Goethe Greece represented the epitome to which there was no return. This preoccupation with the classical past seemed to be a way of coming to terms with the present: how to talk about art in an era in which "vollkommene Werke" were no longer possible. Thus it was that he began to think of world literature.

Picture credits: Wyngman; Arte Spain

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

Bodmer and world literature

Henry Fuseli, Satan Starting from the Touch of Ithuriel's Spear

A recent article of mine claimed J.J. Bodmer as a precursor of the philosophic discussion of the sublime in German letters. Despite the title of this post, I am not really claiming him as a forerunner of Goethe's concept of world literature. I came across a quotation by him today, however, that made me think of Goethe's use of the terms "commerce" and "trade" to describe intellectual exchange. Here is the quote from Bodmer, from the preface of the Neue kritische Briefe of 1746:

Der Verfasser will gerne für einen nützlichen Kaufmann angesehen seyn, der zu den vornehmsten europäischen Nationen gereiset ist, und bey ihnen kostbare Waaren von Witz und Kunst gesammelt hat, welche er izt nach Hause bringt, und seinen Landsleuten überliefert, ihrem einheimischen Bedürfniss damit zu Hülfe zu kommen.

The quote appears at the end of a very long article written by the American-German comparatist Louis Paul Betz on the occasion of the 200th anniversary of Bodmer's birth on July 19, 1898. Betz is one of the comparatists I have been reading lately. Although Betz concedes that Bodmer made a major contribution to changing literary tastes in German letters, he lays to rest the notion that Bodmer was anti-French in any way. He describes the feud between Bodmer and Gottsched as part of the ongoing "Battle of the Ancients and Moderns." Even the treatise on the marvelous, Bodmer's defense of Milton's Paradise Lost against Voltaire's criticisms of the epic, contains no serious arguments. While defending the claims of "Phantasie" and challenging the insipid "reason" poetry of post-classical France (die nüchterne Verstandespoesie des nachklassischen Frankreichs), Bodmer fails here to be a literary pathbreaker. Instead, he contents himself with accusing Voltaire of "unverschämte Dreistigkeit" and "unverdaute Begriffe," without any true criticism.

Jacques-Louis David, The Anger of Achilles

Betz includes some wonderful quotes from Bodmer's attacks on Gottsched, which Betz calls "schonungslos" and "unerbittlich." Bodmer reveled in pointing out the shortcomings of Gottsched's translation of Racine's tragedy Iphigenia. As Betz writes, "Nicht genug kann er wiederholen, welcher Abgrund zwischen Original und Nachbildung liegt." And then, quoting Bodmer: "Die traurige Erfahrung anderer Poeten hätte ihn [Gottsched] lehren sollen, kein Original zu erkiesen, das seine Uebersetzng notwendig beschämen musste."

Betz does a very good job of portraying the overwhelming influence of French culture on Germany in the 18th century. His article is an example of what he himself asserted was the purpose of comparative literature, namely, to demonstrate the influence of writers of one country on writers of another. Unfortunately, one comes aways feeling that Bodmer did not have a single original literary insight (or, for that matter, a literary bone in his body); even when invoking the rights of the imagination, he was pleading with the arguments of French writers, in particular Dubos. The article confirmed a view that I presented in my article on Bodmer: it was through literature, through the writings of the best poets, not through experience, that one learned how to live properly. Read Molière if you wanted to know about people's motivations.

Fritz Strich, in his schema of the development of European literatures, makes the argument that Germany's "hour" had struck when French neoclassicism had played itself out and the literary Zeitgeist required an infusion of new life, which was provided by Romanticism. Bodmer (and Breitinger) was certainly the most important early mediator in this process, particularly in introducing the Germans to English letters (even if, according to Betz, he did not fully grasp Milton's greatness). Mediation, of course, is a central aspect of Goethe's concept of world literature. While Gottsched was urging German writers to model themselves on French writers, Bodmer's writings had the effect, in the end, in leading  Germans to create a "German" literature.

"The cosmopolitan spirit"

Just a few more comments on Joseph Texte's book on Rousseau and cosmopolitanism. Texte seems to define cosmopolitanism as Romanticism bred with the "classical spirit," the latter of French provenance, of course. This cosmopolitanism has now (writing in 1899) gone on to "embrace the literature of the world." Thus, Frenchmen like Hugo and Chateaubriand, he writes, are no longer Frenchmen in the way of their predecessors, but speak to a more "European side of the national genius."

He then imagines a literary scenario that, in many respects, has come to pass by the early 21st century. Noting the number of books published on the "little European continent," the multiplicity of translations, and facility of exchange, he asks the following:

Would it be so absurd if, from the comparison, the juxtaposition, and, let us admit it, the confusion of so many works from every country in Europe, there should result a sort of composite ideas consisting of elements artificially compounded so as to form a literature no longer ether English or German or French, but simply European--until the time should come when it would be universal? Should such a day ever arrive, across the frontiers  -- if any remain -- there will be stretched a network of invisible bonds which will unite nation to nation and, as of old during the Middle Ages, will form a collective European soul.

He does not see this "peril" as imminent, as there remain obstacles in its way, "men held together for long years to come by community of race, of language, and of historical tradition" and preserving the literary heritage as a "sacred legacy." Leslie Stephen, in his review of Texte's book, comments on this scenario: "At present, we do not seem to be rapidly approaching the period at which patriotism will be lost in universal philanthropy. When the 'parliament of man' has been elected by the 'federation of the world,' it will be time enough to make up our minds as to the gain and loss."

 Stephen continues:

The real danger is ... a little different. It is quite true that the modern author does his best to be in one way cosmopolitan. He goes about the world searching for new sensations. If an original writer arises in France or Germany, Russia or Norway, he is translated and imitated, and has his sect of fervent admirers in every other civilized country. That, no doubt, represents a very different state of things from the old order, under which each vernacular literature grew up utterly unconscious of the existence of others, or even from the order in which a small body of critics could lay down a code of absolute laws and keep to the elaboration of a single type.

He does not allude to economic trade and commerce, probably because men of intellect like Leslie Stephen (don't forget Carlyle and Ruskin) disdained trade and commerce and believed in something like an intellectual spirit progressing through history.

The spread of Roman culture (click to enlarge)

 From my reading of Goethe's comments on world literature, it strikes me that he was aware that it was specifically the rapidity of world commerce and trade that was affecting the field of culture. He writes, for instance, of the "rapidity" of these transformational processes going on by the early 19th century. According to Stefan Hoesel-Uhlig in his contribution to Debating World Literature (ed. Christopher Prendergast), Goethe was engaged with "a changing field" and thus did not concentrate on any one discipline. Instead, his "encyclopedic interests" caused him to perceive "new general structures for poetic and intellectual work, ... [a] transformation of cultural space ... and the emergent conditions for further interest and exchange."

Commerce in its crassly material sense of economic trade has, by now, produced a composite "West," nations sharing lifestyles that are, with ever lessening national variations, pretty similar. Back in 1950, if my parents had traveled to Europe, they would not have felt comfortable staying in most French or German homes, simply because the interior facilities would have been so foreign to them. Today the differences are ones of style, and indeed many American homes now copy the interiors of French or Italian or German interior decor.

The same goes for literary "products," at least in the literary market place.

Picture credits: San Rafael Chamber of Commerce; Bible Light

Fritz Strich and Goethe's concept of world literature

Because of my editorial duties in connection with the book on the history of freedom of speech -- the title, by the way, will be Freedom of Speech: The History of an Idea -- I have not been able to get to my real area of scholarly interest for some time, namely, Goethe and world literature. I have also been detoured by another topic, this time at least on a Goethe subject, the sublime. I first began working on the latter when writing on Goethe's geology; the result was an article in the Goethe Yearbook a few years back. And because of that article, I was asked to participate in a panel at the recent German Studies Association conference on the pre-Kantian sublime, which, in turn, took me further away from world literature. Still, as I gradually put the free speech volume and an article on the sublime behind me, I look forward to getting back to world literature in the New Year.

In this connection, I was recently reminded of Fritz Strich, who was the scholar who put world literature on the academic map. A strange aspect of world literature, which Goethe began to speak and write about in the 1820s, was that the idea lay fallow for another half-century. True, since Goethe had utter the oracular words, there was some attention to the concept in the late 19th century, but it wasn't until the discipline of comparative literature began to be established that world literature was drafted to talk about the scope of the new discipline. Still, everyone got it wrong, speaking of world lit as if it stretched back in time, back to Homer or Gilgamesh, or extended to other parts of the world, encompassing, for instance, Chinese or Indian literature. Goethe was speaking of a future phenomenon. More about that at another time.

Before World War II, there were a couple important articles on world literature, but the first major publication on the subject appeared in 1946, with the first edition of Goethe und die Weltliteratur, by Fritz Strich. An academic growth subject was born, and by the 1950s the industry began. The concept of world literature seems to fill a conceptual need, much as did "the sublime" in the 18th century, when that term was drafted to express the new aesthetic consciousness. After all, Longinus's treatise on the sublime (written in ca. 80 A.D.) had been around in Europe since the first editions in the 16th century. It was not until the beginning of the 18th century, however, especially with Joseph Addison's essays on the imagination, that the concept really took off and dominated theoretical discussions through the century, culminating in the works of Schiller and Kant.

A few years ago I placed an inquiry in the Times Literary Supplement concerning Fritz Strich, asking for personal reminiscences of Strich. From a scholarly and an intellectual point of view, Strich has certainly been as important as, say, Erich Auerbach or Ernst Robert Curtius, whose works are familiar to many outside of Germany. Besides his study of world literature, Strich is almost single-handedly responsible for the rediscovery of German Baroque literature, with an essay on that subject in 1916. Nevertheless, aside from a small Festschrift honoring Strich, there has been no work on him as a person. At the time of my TLS inquiry, however, I received no responses.

Much to my surprise I recently received a letter from Switzerland, from Heinz Günter, an English translator who works in Berne. Mr. Günter, who had saved my TLS inquiry, now sent me a speech given by the novelist John Le Carré on the occasion of the 175th anniversary of the University of Berne. Le Carré, it turns out, had as a young Englishman (his name is actually David Cornwell) studied in Berne and had some very kind words to say about Fritz Strich, especially about Strich's encouragement of him. Indeed, Le Carre's tribute to the university and to Strich reminded me very much of my own experience as a student in Germany in the late 1960s. Though I was not so fortunate to have a professor like Fritz Strich take an interest in me, I did have many German friends who initiated me into German ways and also helped me to become a capable speaker of German. Unfortunately, after three-quarters of a century, Le Carré was unable to provide any specific details about the lectures he attended. The impression remains, however, of the kind, polite nature of Fritz Strich. (Here is a link to an article in English, which makes many of the same points as in Le Carré's Berne talk.) I am still hoping for reminiscences from others, though I suspect I may one day have to go to Berne and do some research in the archives that contain Strich's papers.

Goethe and World Literature

Just a few final observations on Françoise Waquet's marvelous book on Latin. As she writes, in part 1, which I discussed in my last post: "The whole cultural history of the Western world from the Renaissance to the mid-twentieth century can be inscribed under the sign of Latin." In part 2 she showed that competence in Latin, even at the highest levels of the Church and in "the Republic of Letters," was not as high as imagined. "One would have liked," she writes, "to know the extact Latin in which Descartes talked to Beeckman on the occasion of their meeting at Breda."

Part 3 concerns "What Latin Meant." She traces the beginnings of the revival of Latin in the Quattrocento. For the Italian humanists, "culture" resided in the great writers of antiquity, who were seen as the source of all learning. The acquisition of classical Greek and Latin "became the foundation of education in the full sense of the term." Education in the broadest sense based itself on "dialogue" with masters who were recognized as "archetypes for humanity."

The Humanist restoration, however, which, in a sense, reconstituted Latin "by committee," broke the vitality of Latin in its medieval incarnation (go to this link for a hilarious video of monks in the Middle Ages), and Latin afterward lived an "artificial, specious existence," separating scholars from ordinary folks. Too much learning also drew attention to itself, and in the 16th century people were making fun of the "pedantry" of humanists. By the 17th century it was recognized that children, despite spending up to ten years of instruction in Latin, were leaving school with little knowledge of the language. In the 18th century, the era of Enlightenment, the humanist model of education, based on Latin, was challenged on the grounds of utility.

In the U.S., for instance, Founding Father Benjamin Rush (pictured left in the painting by Peale) equated classical studies with "Negro slavery and spirituous liquors" in their unfriendliness "to the progress of morals, knowledge, and religion in the U.S." Thus, the "classical ideal" began its slow retreat and, in the 1960s, disappeared as an educational premise in one fell swoop in the Western world.

Interestingly, the development of modern vernaculars in Western Europe coincided with scientific specialization. The result was that scholars, speaking a variety of languages, could no longer communicate with one another, especially at the international conferences that began to take place in the 19th century. Surprise, surprise -- people started talking about the need for an international language. They claimed that "scientific sociability" would be strengthened, as would something called "human solidarity." A universal language would allow people from all over the world to understand one another "in perfect transparency, and the curse of Babel would be lifted at last."

Countering this desire, Waquet cites a passage from Umberto Eco's The Search for a Perfect Language, in which he speaks of "the possibility of companionship in a continent multilingual by vocation":

"The problem of European culture in the future certainly does not reside in the triumph of total polyglotism .. but in a community of individuals capable of grasping the spirit, the scent, the atmosphere of a different language. A polyglots' Europe is not a Europe of persons who speak a lot of languages, but at best of persons who can communicate by speaking their own languages and understanding other people's, persons, who, although they cannot speak other languages fluently and may have difficulty understanding them, do understand the 'genius,' the cultural universe, conveyed by anyone who is speaking the language of his ancestors and his tradition."

I have not (yet) read Eco's book and don't know if Goethe is referenced in it, but this quote comes close to some of Goethe's utterances of the subject of world literature, which often suggest a desire for a return to the kind of comity Eco was prizing.Here are a few nuggets:

I am convinced that a world literature is in the process of formation, that all nations are inclined to participate in it and are therefore taking steps to do so (in a letter to Streckfuß in January 1827).

Literary journals, as they increase their readership, will contribute effectively to the hoped-for universal world literature. Let us repeat however, that we don't mean that all nations should think alike but that they become aware of one another, understand one another, and, if they don't love one another, at least to be mutually tolerant (in Über Kunst und Altertum, 1828).

For some time there has been talk of world literature, and correctly so. For if was evident among all the nations, thrown together by the most terrible wars, could not help noting the influence of foreign ways after returning to their status as individual nations; they had absorbed these foreign influences and even become conscious of intellectual needs previously unknown. The result was a sense of neighborliness. Instead of returning to their former isolation, they gradually developed a desire to be included in the increasingly free exchange of ideas (introduction to Carlyle's Life of Schiller, 1830).

Goethe's subject was a literary one, and, like many a public intellectual of today, he imagined that it would be men of letters who would lead the way to comity and appreciation of the nations for one another.

Goethe and Japan

The title of this post is actually a teaser, for Goethe was really unfamiliar with Japan. From the beginning of the 17th century until 1853 Japan was closed off to most of the outside world, aside from limited trading relations with China and the Netherlands at the trading port of Nagasaki. Thus, Goethe died (1832) just before the end of the long period of national isolation. By the 1850s Japan mania was beginning among Western artists. Japanese prints, for instance, had a great influence on the development of Impressionism. Traditional Japanese art owes much to Chinese art. Though Goethe turned his attention to Chinese literature in the 1820s, and published the collection Chinesisch-deutsche Jahres- and Tageszeiten, he seemed unfamiliar with Chinese art.

Knowing Goethe's classical preferences in art, I am thus of two minds whether he would have appreciated the fine works on display at The Japan Society here in Manhattan. My friend Suzanne was visiting New York over the Thanksgiving weekend and phoned to ask if I would accompany her to a "textile show" at the Society. Little did I know that it was a major exhibition of the works of Serizawa Keiskuke (1895-1984), designated a "living national treasure" in his lifetime.

The works were imaginative and eye-catching, in the true sense of that word, and often drawing on Japanese and Okinawan folk tradition, then (after World War II) absorbing something like a modernist aesthetic. Since I spent several years living in Japan, I was also reminded of the very different Japanese color sense, a preference for bold, unmodulated colors. I can't help feeling that Goethe would have found this stencil print very jarring. On the other hand, he would have been compelled to try to understand it. It's a shame that Goethe wrote his essays on art and literature before the effects of the "world literature" that he envisioned came to pass. These essays often come across as pedestrian, indeed pedantic, an effect that seems dictated by the narrow nature of the mostly European subjects he wrote about. An exception, of course, is Goethe's foray into the literature and culture of the Middle East, with The West-East Divan, in particular the notes that accompany it. With Japan's opening in the 1850s, however, the era of "world literature," with its manifold possibilities of artistic and literary exchange, moved beyond its Eurocentric source. Interestingly, Islamic and Chinese cultures, which Goethe did explore, have been resistant to absorbing the "universalist" ideas implicit in the notion of world literature. Long-standing imperialist cultures have their own ideas of universality.

Goethe, Wieland, and World Literature

Goethe, according to Eckermann (July 15, 1827), mentioned a benefit of " the present close communications [Verkehr]" among the French, English and Germans, namely, that they find themselves in the position of being able "to correct [korrigieren] one another." I think he means by correction something like "revision" of a country's image of itself. Such revision is one of the functions of world literature. His example here is Carlyle's biography of Schiller, which appraises Schiller in a way that no German would be likely to do. Similarly, Goethe continued, Germans understand Shakespeare and Byron and appreciate their achievements even more than do the English themselves. Thus, we come to recognize ourselves more clearly through the judgments of others and thus are able to engage in revision. Writers of course have always taken note of the efforts of other writers -- Virgil would hardly have written the Aneid had he not had Homer's epics to emulate -- but Goethe is noting the civilizing effects on countries in the modern world, sort of "getting to know you."

An early example of Goethe's noting of the useful benefits of contact between writers of different nations can be found in remarks he made in honor of Christoph Martin Wieland (1733-1813) shortly after the latter's death ("Zu brüderlichem Andenken Wielands"; WA 1,36: 313-46). He mentions the influence on Wieland of the English writer Shaftesbury (1671-1713).

The latter worked on a larger stage and in what Goethe calls "a more earnest time" than Wieland. He also enjoyed great advantages: he was born to high status, had traveled and occupied high offices. Wieland, though coming from much narrower circumstances, was nevertheless spiritually akin to the Englishman: Goethe describes this kinship as one of "opinion, cast of mind, and overall view" (Ansicht, Gesinnung und Übersicht). By dint of hard work Wieland transmitted Shaftsbury's optimistic and moral rationalism in his own light and graceful works. The artist John Closterman designed the portrait below of Shaftesbury and his brother Maurice to convey the neo-Platonist beliefs of the brothers. Shaftsbury gestures toward the light of knowledge.

Later in his appreciation of Wieland Goethe captures something of this Shaftesburian spirit by describing Wieland's aversion to "the enormous system of theories" (das ungeheure Lehrgebäude) of late Kantian philosophy. To those who had been used to passing their life "poeticizing or philosophizing," this system must have been nothing less than a "threatening stronghold or oppressive fortress restricting their cheerful excursions across the field of experience" (eine Drohburg, eine Zwingfeste ... von woher ihre heitern Streifzüge über das Feld der Erfahrhung beschränkt werden sollten).

It should be noted that John Quincy Adams, our sixth president, was an admirer of Wieland's works. He translated Wieland's poetic masterpiece, Oberon (1780), into English.

Picture credits: The Plate Lady

Goethe and "World Culture"

Is there or should there be a "world culture"? This question occurred to me as I searched the web for some ideas on translation in connection with Goethe. At the site Literary Translation, of the British Council, I found the following statement: "Translation has played and plays a key role in the development of world culture." Then, "It is common to think of culture as national and absolutely distinct."

Clearly, since Goethe lived "absolutely distinct" traditional cultures are going the way of the dodo. When I first went to Germany as a student, it was obvious to me that Germans were different from Americans and also from other Europeans I encountered. Swedish girls, for instance, were not to be confused with Italian ones. The same with the males of Europe. Goethe was aware of these differences. Thus his comment: "Every nation has its idiosyncracies which differentiate it from others and make it feel isolated from, attracted to or repelled by them. The outward manifestations of these idiosyncracies usually seem strikingly repugnant, or at best ridiculous, to another nation. They also are the reason why we tend to respect a nation less than it deserves."

It was the appreciation of these cultural differences, often repellant to outsiders, that Goethe saw as a benefit of world literature. He didn't envision that there would be a unified "world culture." In 1828, for instance, writing about the contribution of periodicals to world literature, he stresses that countries should think alike, only that they should be aware of one another. (There are inconsistencies or paradoxes -- aporias, as we like to say in academia -- in Goethe's comments on world literature; I will return to these at a later date.)

Festival of World Culture at Dun Laoghaire, 2006

About twenty years ago, however, I began to notice here in New York that I could no longer distinguish Germans from Danes from French and so. Only the Africans, standing on street corners selling "Gucci" bags or "Rolex" watches, seemed foreign anymore. There is now a "McEurope" (is that the effect of the E.U.?).

The concept of "world culture" (along with "multiculturalism") has certainly taken off in recent years. Again, I tie this spread not to a growth in humanistic thinking but rather to global commerce. The results (at least for those of us who care about "culture," "civilization," "Western values," and all that stuff that the world culturalists would like to usher off the stage of history) are quite sappy, as some of the pictures here vividly demonstrate.

Picture credits: Do-ho-Suh; Unity-and-Diversity World Council; the Dublin Community Blog; Explore and More

World Literature (1)

"National-Literatur will jetzt nicht viel sagen, die Epoche der Welt-Literatur ist an der Zeit, und jeder muß jetzt dazu wirken, diese Epoche zu beschleunigen" (Conversation with Eckermann, January 1827)

World literature is the subject of my current research. The (1) in the title above indicates that more on that subject will follow. Goethe began using the term "Weltliteratur" in the 1820s, but even before then he was impressed with the extent of "internationalization": by the early 19th century worldwide commerce and trade were beginning to introduce a certain uniformity in the lives of Europeans of the upper orders. More and more people traveled across the oceans, to earn profits, of course, but the contact with different peoples and the new goods that were brought back began to shrink the world in a  real sense. Goethe imagined that "intellectual commerce" -- in the form of books and translations and communications among writers -- would produce an international marketplace of ideas. "World literature" was the name of this marketplace, which would have the effect of making men (and women, too) more "worldly," in other words: less provincial, less national, less ethnocentric.

(Credit for image: Espéculo 34 (2006)