Debating World Literature (review)

Abstract

Christopher Prendergast, ed., Debating World Literature London and New York: Verso, 2004, xiii + 353 pp. Comparatists interested in issues involving world literature will recognize Christopher Prendergast as Mary Ann Caws's associate in putting together HarperCollins World Reader (1994). This ambitious, wide-ranging editorial project represented one of first attempts at giving a truly global scope to world-literature anthologies in United States, which at that time were almost exclusively in emphasis. Prendergast, who was then affiliated with City University of New York, has now moved to Cambridge University; and this collection of fifteen essays, ten of which have previously appeared elsewhere, reflects that itinerary. No fewer than six come from scholars at Cambridge, four more from New York and its environs, and two others from London, leaving two essays from Denmark and one by Stanford's Franco Moretti as improbably exotic additions. Possible doubts about a narrowly North Atlantic and Anglo-American agenda, however, are quickly dispelled by book's broad range of topics. Taking its origin in Prendergast's divided response to Pascale Casanova's La Republique mondiale des lettres (1999), which he admires for its scope but which he contends defined world literature too exclusively in terms of national literatures competing for dominance in a global market, Debating World Literature avoids any single overarching thesis. Unlike David Damrosch, whose What Is World Literature? proposed criterion of that circulate well in translation, or Sarah Lawall, who recommends attending to acknowledged masterpieces from other cultures while recognizing that one's own culture must have some priority, Prendergast believes that world literature still has same status that it had for Goethe: it remains a concept open to indefinitely extended reflection and debate (viii). In this spirit essays in DebatingWorld Literature seek to critique at least four assumptions of varying orders of magnitude that have guided thinking on this subject. The most basic critique centers on concept of literature itself. Reminding us in his own essay that original republic of letters featured writing that would not qualify as literary today, Prendergast follows up with Stefan Hoesel-Uhlig's discussion of distinctly non-belle-lettristic view of literature behind Goethe's famous coinage. Variations on this theme continue with Moretti's comparatist manifesto, Conjectures on World Literature, with its iconoclastic call for a second-hand scholarship (151) that, instead of pursuing hopeless goal of reading world's literatures, would limit itself to synthesizing conclusions of specialists from disparate locales and regions. Only by avoiding a traditional immersion in specific works might students of world literature come to learn true nature of a field whose basic procedures still need to be established. Equally provocative is Simon Goldhill's Literary History without Literature, whose case studies of Greek, Roman, and early Christian antiquity bring out their widely varying practices of language production and consumption.He thereby suggests the destructive poverty of category of 'literature' without even having to leave a familiarly Western terrain (196). A similar critique of narrowly literary definitions of verbal art marks Bruce Clunies Ross's Rhythmical Knots: The World of English Poetry. Ranging from Caribbean to Australia, from Ireland to United States, and through England itself (and addressing Indian or Nigerian bilingualism as well), Ross shows how variations in contemporary spoken English undermine vision of poetry as purely that was associated with older, imperial doctrines of standard English. Prendergast gives this point its fullest global reach when he acknowledges that both historically and geographically, oral vastly exceeds written (4). …