World literature as a hermeneutic utopia and a scholarly reality

Abstract

In its interpretation of the opposition ‘national literature – world literature’ as defined by Goethe in 1827 the article relies on the dialectic of the hermeneutic circle, related to Goethe’s idea in the general context of the Classical-Romantic utopia of aesthetic humanism. Analyzing Goethe’s statements about world literature, one finds that his tentative concept did not suggest universal surrender of national-specific differences, but rather integration of national literatures (with all of their unique features) as relatively autonomous but mutually conditioned elements of a single literary communication supersystem. According to Goethe, each national literature established itself by involvement in the developing existence of a whole, without losing its identity to an amorphous composite of literatures. By fully preserving its individuality, it in fact joined in a special polyphonic order: a unity of diversity and interpenetration. Goethe, therefore, laid the foundations of a new philological discourse, which gave rise to comparative literary studies as a new scholarly discipline.