Johann Wolfgang Goethe

Abstract

Contrary to popular perception, Germany’s most celebrated writer, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, was not the first intellectual to employ the term “world literature”. Though Goethe’s failure to cogently articulate his concept seems to imbue it with a scattered, uncohesive, even superficial quality, one can discern certain core postulates in his variegated employment of the term when his random remarks on the subject are considered as a whole. Germany only existed in the 1820s as what historians term a cultural nation, but even the cultural and linguistic commonalities infusing contemporary German literature could not constitute for Goethe a national literature. Emily Apter’s The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature examines contemporary translation technologies as they continue to shape the globe’s language politics in the post-9/11 world.