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On the Never-To-Be-Completed Project of Critiquing World Literature

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Vergleichende Weltliteraturen / Comparative World Literatures

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Zusammenfassung

In the ever-expanding corpus of writing about world literature, it is an all too common occurrence to read some foundational quotes by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe , and then to jump directly to Erich Auerbach or even to more recent scholars such as David Damrosch or Gayatri Spivak , thus bracketing more than a century of ‘Arbeit an der Weltliteratur’, which I will argue here includes critiques of and resistance to world literature.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Ernst Moritz Arndt : Lasset euch nicht verführen, oder die Weltliteratur. In: Schriften an und für seine lieben Deutschen. Leipzig 1842, pp. 307–332, p. 312.

  2. 2.

    Literally, “work on world literature”, coined off the title of Hans Blumenberg ’s Arbeit am Mythos (Frankfurt a. M. 1979). Blumenberg ’s treatment of myth works against its reification (see section I below), and he includes the cyclically repeating critiques of myth or laments for its death, as well as myth’s constant rebirthings in a variety of forms and media.

  3. 3.

    See B. Venkat Mani : Recoding World Literature. Libraries, Print Culture, and Germany’s Pact with Books. New York 2017; Peter Goßens: Weltliteratur - Modelle transnationaler Literaturwahrnehmung im 19. Jahrhundert. Stuttgart 2011; John Pizer: The Idea of World Literature. History and Pedagogical Practice. Baton Rouge 2006.

  4. 4.

    André Comte-Sponville : Critique. In: Dictionnaire philosophique. Paris 2001, p. 138.

  5. 5.

    See Sarah Brouillette: Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace. New York 2007; Mani, Recoding World Literature, pp. 9–21.

  6. 6.

    Erich Auerbach : Philologie der Weltliteratur. In: Weltliteratur. Festgabe für Fritz Strich zum 70. Geburtstag. Ed. by Walter Muschg and Emil Staiger. Bern 1952, pp. 39–50, p. 39.

  7. 7.

    See Michel Le Bris/Jean Rouaud: Pour une littérature-monde. Paris 2007; and Kathryn Kleppinger: What’s Wrong with the Littérature-Monde Manifesto? In: Contemporary French and Francophone Studies 14/1 (2010), pp. 77–84.

  8. 8.

    Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: [Einleitung zu] Thomas Carlyle, „Leben Schillers“. In: Gesammelte Werke. Vol. XVIII: Schriften zur Literatur. Berlin 2011, pp. 397–412, p. 399.

  9. 9.

    Stefan Hoesl-Uhlig: Changing Fields. The Directions of Goethe ’s Weltliteratur. In: Christopher Prendergast (ed.): Debating World Literature. London 2004, pp. 26–53, p. 53.

  10. 10.

    See Jan Hilgevoord/Jos Uffink: The Uncertainty Principle. In: The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, https://plato.stanford.edu (01.02.2019).

  11. 11.

    See Walter Cohen: A History of European Literature. The West and the World from Antiquity to the Present. Oxford 2017.

  12. 12.

    Clive Scott: The Work of Literary Translation. Cambridge 2018, p. 13.

  13. 13.

    Randall Collins : The Sociology of Philosophies. A Global Theory of Intellectual Change. Cambridge MA 1998, pp. 19–20.

  14. 14.

    Walter Benjamin : Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers. In: Gesammelte Schriften. Vol. IV/1. Frankfurt a. M. 1972, pp. 10–11.

  15. 15.

    Emily Apter : Against World Literature. New York 2013, p. 3.

  16. 16.

    See ibid., pp. 117–90.

  17. 17.

    Ibid., pp. 155.

  18. 18.

    Barbara Cassin (ed.): Vocabulaire européen des philosophies: dictionnaire des intraduisibles. Paris 2004.

  19. 19.

    Oswald Spengler : Der Untergang des Abendlandes. München 1963, p. 684.

  20. 20.

    See Alexander Beecroft: An Ecology of World Literature. From Antiquity to the Present Day. London/New York 2015, pp. 33–34 and 37–99.

  21. 21.

    Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: Translating in a World of Languages. In: Profession (2010), pp. 35–43, p. 36.

  22. 22.

    Waïl S. Hassan: World Literature in the Age of Globalization. Reflections on an Anthology. In: College English 63.1 (2000), pp. 38–47, p. 42.

  23. 23.

    Collins , The Sociology of Philosophies, p. 21.

  24. 24.

    Karl Marx/Friedrich Engels: Manifesto of the Communist Party. In: The Marx-Engels Reader. Ed. by Robert C. Tucker. New York 1978, pp. 469–500, p. 476–77.

  25. 25.

    S. S. Prawer: Karl Marx and World Literature. Oxford 1976, p. 145.

  26. 26.

    Wilhelm Amann/Dieter Heimböckel: Karl Marx interkulturell. Aus gegebenem Anlass. In: Zeitschrift für interkulturelle Germanistik 9/1 (2018), pp. 169–71, p. 170.

  27. 27.

    The Warwick Collective: Combined and Uneven Development. Towards a New Theory of World-Literature. Liverpool 2015, p. X.

  28. 28.

    Durs Grünbein: Weltliteratur. Ein Panoramagemälde. In: Warum schriftlos leben? Aufsätze. Frankfurt a. M. 2003, pp. 23–33, p. 25–26.

  29. 29.

    Pheng Cheah: What is a World? Durham NC 2016, p. 73.

  30. 30.

    Ibid., p. 129.

  31. 31.

    Vilém Flusser: Zwiegespräche. Interviews 1967–1991. Göttingen 1967, pp. 153–54.

  32. 32.

    Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: [Ferneres über Weltliteratur]. In: Gesammelte Werke. Vol. XVIII: Schriften zur Literatur. Berlin 2011, pp. 429–30.

  33. 33.

    Johannes Scherr (ed.): Bildersaal der Weltliteratur. Stuttgart 1848.

  34. 34.

    Friedrich Nietszche: Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik. Ed. by G. Colli and M. Montinari. München 1980, pp. 119–20.

  35. 35.

    See Moriz Carrière: Die Kunst im Zusammenhang der Culturentwickelung und die Ideale der Menscheit. 5 Vol. Leipzig 1863–1873.

  36. 36.

    Dennis Schmidt : On Germans and Other Greeks. Tragedy and Ethical Life. Bloomington 2001, p. 215.

  37. 37.

    See Weigui Fang (ed.): Tensions in World Literature. Between the Local and the Universal. New York 2018.

  38. 38.

    See Thomas O. Beebee: What the World Thinks About Literature. In: Ursula Heise (ed.): Futures of Comparative Literature. ACLA State of the Discipline Report. New York 2017, pp. 61–70.

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  1. University Park, PA, USA

    Thomas O. Beebee

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  1. Thomas O. Beebee
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  1. Institut für Allgemeine und Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität, Mainz, Germany

    Dieter Lamping

  2. School of Languages, Linguistics and Film, Queen Mary University, London, UK

    Galin Tihanov

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Beebee, T.O. (2019). On the Never-To-Be-Completed Project of Critiquing World Literature. In: Lamping, D., Tihanov, G. (eds) Vergleichende Weltliteraturen / Comparative World Literatures. J.B. Metzler, Stuttgart. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-476-04925-4_20

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