The search for world language and world literature in poetry

Abstract

Alokeranjan Dasgupta in the essay takes up the question of world literature with the focus on Rabindranath Tagore along with Goethe and Herder. The essay begins with the question of mutual influence brought into focus by Friedrich Schlegel and then moves to Goethe’s pronouncements on the necessity to look beyond national literatures to analyse the concept of world literature. Goethe’s world literature, the author demonstrates, is confined to Europe despite the author’s attention to other literatures on certain occasions. Mapping the ideas of some of his followers it seems that Goethe’s concept gets absorbed within a ‘norm determining’ Eurocentrism. The parameters of colonialism hence get absorbed in literary criticism in a misappropriation of Goethe’s ideas. Tagore, on the other hand, drawing upon Goethe, is closer to our times. His focus is on the relationship of the part to the whole, an aspect evident in Goethe to some extent but not foregrounded as such. This relationship is extended to rural or folk literature where Tagore suggests the presence of folk literature at the foundation of sophisticated literature. It is Herder and not Goethe who inspires him to find this model of a sustainable relationship between the base and structure, the rural and the so-called elite. The author emphasises that Tagore will remain important in one’s engagement with world literature.