What is 'World Literature'?

1. What is ‘World Literature’? What in your opinion is World Literature?
2. Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749 to 1832), Germany’s most celebrated writer, used the term Weltliteratur ‘world literature.’ He wasn’t the first one to use this word but he is the one who should be credited with the creation of this paradigm of literary discourse as it has come to be understood in recent times.
3. Pronunciation of Goethe’s name. Practice. These linguistic features of another language force us out of our comfort zone. Extrapolating on this discomfort. The discomfort in pronouncing a foreign name or a word is very important because it should make us realize that there are people who are different than us, who think differently, whose social norms and cultural mores are different from those of us.
4. Johann Peter Eckerman was the secretary of Goethe and he published his conversations with Goethe in 1836, four years after Goethe’s death.
5. In the entry of Wed, 31 Jan, 1827, Eckerman writes that Goethe mentioned a Chinese novel that he was reading at the time. Please go through these conversations in the book Conversations of Goethe by Johann Peter Eckerman. 
6. “Chinese novel!” said Eckerman; “that must look strange enough.” “Not so much as you might think,” said Goethe; “the Chinamen think, act, and feel almost exactly like us; and we soon find that we are perfectly like them, excepting that all they do is more clear, more pure, and decorous than with us. “With them all is orderly, citizenlike, without great passion or poetic flight; and there is a strong resemblance to my ‘Hermann and Dorothea,’ as well as to the English novels of Richardson. They likewise differ from us, inasmuch as with them external nature is always associated with the human figures.
7. Goethe then goes on to say:
8. National literature is now rather an unmeaning term; the epoch of World literature is at hand, and every one must strive to hasten its approach.
9. There are two important questions that we need to ask here: What Chinese novel was Goethe reading and how was Goethe able to obtain this Chinese novel?
10. I asked Professor Daniel Purdy who is a professor of German studies at Penn State University about the novel that Goethe was reading. According to Professor Purdy, the name of the novel is The Two Cousins. Goethe read the novel in its French translation and in French the novel is called Les Deux Cousines. In Chinese, its name is Iu-Kiao-Ii (Chi wee).
11. Iu-Kiao-Ii is a Caizi jiaren, which is a genre of Chinese fiction typically involving a romance between a male young scholar and a beautiful girl. They were very popular in Ming and Qing dynasties in China. Please look it up in your own time.
12. So now the question is: how was a Chinese novel available in French?
13.  According to Professor Purdy, ‘the novel was in the royal collections in Paris… It had sat in Paris unread because no one could read it.’
14. Jean-Pierre Abel-Rémusat (1788-1832) had studies medicine as a young man. He came across a Chinese medical document dealing with herbal medicines and developed an interest in the Chinese language and went on to learn it. He held the first Chair of Sinology at Collège de France.
15. According to Professor Purdy, ‘Why Abel Remusat chose to translate this one particular novel over the many others in the library is another question. I have always suspected that the story had a certain scandalous appeal because it ends with a man marrying two women and all living together harmoniously. There had been a few plays about polygamy in the decades before. However, I have no proof about this speculation.’
16. Now the question we should ask is: how did this novel end up in the royal collection in France? According to Professor Purdy, the novel was ‘sent originally as a gift to a French cardinal by Jesuit missionaries in China.’
17. And who were these Jesuit missionaries? And how did they end up in China?
18. The Society of Jesus is a male religious congregation of the Catholic Church which originated in Spain. Its members are called Jesuits. Please read more about it in your own time.
19. How were Jesuits able to enter China? In 1557, the government of China rented Macau out to Portuguese for trade. The Portuguese administered Macau under the government of China till 1887. In 1887, Macau became a colony of the Portuguese empire and it was given back to China in 1999. Macau was one of the first European colonies in China.
20. The purpose of tracing all these historical events is to establish a relationship between colonization and the transfer of knowledge. We will return to this point in detail later and you will be able to better appreciate the relationship between knowledge and power.
21. According to Goethe, ‘world literature was in the process of forming’ because ‘the reception of literary works was moving beyond linguistically and politically drawn cultural borders through increased translation activities and enhanced communication/transportation.’
22. You will do yourself a favor by reading about the history of Germany during the 1800s.
23. The important thing to keep in mind here is the idea of a nation-state, which is itself a fiction.
24. Apart from the Chinese novel, The Two Cousins, Goethe was also fascinated by the 14^th century Persian poet, Khawaja Shams-ud-Din Mohammed Hafiz of Shiraz. Goethe’s poetry cycle West-Eastern Divan, 1819, is an imagined dialogue with Hafiz across space-time.
25. How did Hafiz’s poetry travel to Goethe in German? Goethe even appropriated the genres of Persian poetry in his poetry. Please look these things up in your own time.
26. For Goethe, ‘world literature is a process whereby men of letters in diverse nations learn from each other through relays of literary reception enhanced through translation activity.’
27. Apart from Goethe, another articulation of world literature that students like us who are starting a course on world literature should know is that of Karl Marx’s. Marx asked workers of the world to unite and envisioned ‘a proletariat-generated literature eventually dissolving the various national literatures.’
28. The enterprise of world literature has also been critiqued by leading scholars like Gayatri Spivak.
29. In her book Death of a Discipline (2003), Spivak criticizes the ‘global marketing of English-language world literature anthologies’ because these anthologies promote a Eurocentric view of the world. You can easily relate it with the relationship between knowledge and power that we discussed a little while ago.
30. That’s why we will start our reading list of this course on World Literature in Translation with a short story and its translation by Naiyer Masud. You are requested to read through both these versions of the story and see what has been lost and gained in translation. You are also requested to translate a page or two of the original Urdu version into English and a page or two of the English translation into Urdu. The purpose of this exercise is to acquaint you all with the fact that interpretation is embedded in translation. Masud’s work and its translations are also important because Masud has cooperated extensively with his translators and his suggestions and clarifications have been incorporated in the translated versions of his stories.
31. Naiyer Masud is considered one of the most original short story writers in Urdu and he might prove a little difficult to an uninitiated reader. My suggestion would be to read the story multiple times and you don’t have to worry if you are not able to make sense of a part of the story or even the whole story. You can read more about Naiyer Masud and his work on urdustudies.com.
32. We have talked about World Literature from a European point of view and we also know that postcolonial scholars like Spivak are not comfortable with normativization of a Eurocentric point of view, let’s now explore the idea of World Literature from a non-European standpoint.
33. In Feb 1907, the Indian National Council of Education invited Rabindranath Tagore to deliver a lecture. Tagore chose the title of the lecture, ‘Vishwa Sahitya’ or ‘World Literature.’ In Bengal, he was and continues to be known as Robi Thakur. ‘Tagore’ is the Anglicized version of ‘Thakur.’
34. He was first one in India to talk about World Literature and before Tagore the idea of a world literature was unheard of in India. Even in the West, it was still in its infancy at the time as you can see in the preceding discussion.
35. But before Tagore talked about World Literature, he had talked about a national literature of Bengal at the annual meeting of the Bengal Academy of Literature in 1895. This nationalist sentiment in Tagore can easily be attributed to his anxiety towards the hegemony of the English language in colonial India.
36. But overtime Tagore grew weary of nationalist discourses in India and in his essay ‘Nationalism in India’ written in the US in 1916, he writes that national boundaries are ‘imaginary lines of traditions divested of the qualities of real obstacles.’
37. In order to understand Tagore idea of World Literature, we also need to keep in mind the historical contingencies of the colonial India of early 20^th century.
38. The British administration had divided the state of Bengal into East and West on the pretext that Bengali Hindus and Bengali Muslims cannot be allowed to live together.
39. Another reason, Tagore’s idea of world literature is very relevant especially in the context of India, because with multiple languages and multiple literary traditions, India is a miniature world onto itself.
40. After Tagore won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1913, his collection of poems Gitanjali was translated into various Indian languages using the English translation of the book as the source.
41. Tagore’s entry into Indian languages was slower than his popularity in European languages. Even in recent times, in the Spanish-speaking world, Tagore’s books have sold better than many Spanish-language poets.
42. In the Indian context, we can talk about world literature without having to venture outside of India and its various literary traditions. But the situation in Europe is quite different as compared to India where nation-states have mostly linguistically homogenous populations.
43. Having discussed briefly a non-Eurocentric view of world literature, let’s come back to Goethe and the relationship between power and knowledge.
44. According to Aamir Mufti, a Pakistani scholar who teaches comparative literature at the UCLA, Weltliteratur ‘must be understood as a product of what may be called the Orientalist moment. Even at a very concrete and biographical level, we would have to note that Goethe’s first reported usage of the term occurred in the context of having read “a Chinese novel”.’
45. If you are not familiar with the concept of Orientalism, please read Edward Said’s seminal book Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient.
46. This is very important because according to Aamir Mufti, ‘the history of the West, in effect absolves the Goethean tradition of its involvement with the modern imperial process and remains itself ambivalent about the emerging postcolonial contours of the postwar world.’
47. Goethe’s Weltliteratur presumes the existence of historically discrete cultures of writing e.g. Chinese, Persian, and so on. But China as it is today was not a linguistically homogenous country.
48. Aamir Mufti observes that the ‘“discovery,” dissemination and systematization of “Oriental” textual materials, and their codification into “national” traditions, played a significant role in the consolidation of the European empires.
49. In my own opinion, when we encounter something unfamiliar, we try to understand it in terms of what is already familiar to us. This is what happened with European colonialism too. Wherever Europeans colonized they understood the local demographics in terms of a nation-state with a linguistically homogenous population which was seldom the case as we can see in India. Europeans thought that since they had this superstructure of a nation-state to regulate the lives of its citizens, human beings everywhere would have something like the nation-state.
50. We can see that Goethe is also projecting the idea of the nation-state when he talks about weltliteratur or world literature. He says that the age of national literatures is over and that the dawn of world literature is upon us.
51. According to Aamir Mufti, the enterprise of world literature should be understood in terms of domesticating “diversity” for Western consumption.