What is World Literature? (review)

Abstract

Damrosch, David. 2003. What Is World Literature? Princeton: Princeton University Press. $65.00 hc. $22.95 sc. xiii + 324 pp.The large umbrella category in title of David Damrosch's What Is World Literature? permits its author to complete one mental jete after other as if it were all part of same dance, a la Gene Kelly's famous rain routine. The book's choreography is choppy, chronologically and otherwise; however, its topic is something that literary folks have only begun to think through, and hardly anyone is able to dance through program gracefully. Nonetheless, Damrosch is willing to ask some questions about dance that moves continually from sidewalk into street and back again.Another strong point of this book can be found in its insistence on incompleteness, an acknowledgment that no one is in a position to provide a full context for a text, especially ones from other cultures, from other languages. As we have known at least since Walter Benjamin, history, which includes world literature, is mediated, most often by those whose interests influence reports. Reading is an insufficient condition for understanding history and acting upon it. Perhaps best we can hope for are readers who know that they are partisan and non-omniscient, not that this is best for which Damrosch hopes. His allegiance is to engagement.Damrosch wants to have his culture and oppose it too-at least by gesturing in a direction that might be interpreted as oppositional. He begins What Is World Literature? with an epigraph from The Communist Manifesto, causing at least one reader to think Manifesto and its critique of capitalism must have special significance for author (the quotation comes from volume 50 of Great Books of Western World according to Damrosch's bibliography), but The Communist Manifesto never comes up again in Damrosch's book. Now that's detached engagement.The randomness of topics and texts in Damrosch's philosophically innocent book illustrates amorphousness of world literature, as well as its strength as a vehicle for promoting multiculturalism. We have semi-independent chapters on Mechthild von Magdeburg, on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Johann Peter Eckermann, on Franz Kafka, on Rigoberta Menchu, and on Milorad Pavi?, among others. Damrosch's definition of world literature does not delimit category to something functional: I take world literature to encompass all literary works that circulate beyond their culture of origin, either in translation or in their original language (4). His statement requires that he define literature, and he does not tackle that vexed issue. Damrosch's aims are mostly not about what, but about how; he is concerned mainly with method. He wants to clarify the ways in which works of literature can best be read (5). …