Grand narratives and imagined communication

Abstract

It is well known that national literatures were one of the channels for the development of modern publicity in the 18th and 19th centuries. The communication between civic subjects, regardless of any estate hierarchies, started in the French aristocratic salons at the time of absolutism, when bourgeois men of letters like Diderot and Rousseau were invited as arbiters of good taste; it was proliferated in the German literary and scientific societies, in the British tea and coffee clubs meeting for the discussion of popular novels – to multiply a few decades later in the literary supplements of mass newspapers, in the growing network of loan libraries, publishing houses and literary magazines. This prompts us that publicity should only be discussed in its sociological and national plural form. In the era of early modernity with its worldwide, universal aspirations, literary communications multiplied, written in various vernaculars in the context of various readerships with their respective horizons of expectations. In the early 18th century the practice of corresponding in Latin which used to bring together Thomas More and Erasmus of Rotterdam was already dying. On the other hand, Goethe’s dream of a world literature had another 250 years to happen. So, the shared intellectual privities of the humanists had already disintegrated while the actual literary and public communication existed in the form of peculiar micro-publicities: in the salons of certain rulers, in some literary circles, in a number of limited and non-overlapping distribution networks, in local newspapers or magazines, in local debates, small circulations and the limits set by the national language. In fact, although later these micro-publicities turned into national macro-publicities, their multiplicity was a phenomenon that far outlasted the era of modernity. The national literatures did indeed foster the modern public communication – yet before the time of globalization, satellite TV, CNN and WWW, they formed comparatively limited and isolated communication circles which hardly associated with each other. Not only at the time of emerging national cultures but even later the transliterary and transcultural communication was comparatively limited and mediated for a number of reasons: mostly, the educational and cultural institutions were supported by the nation-state which codified the