World Literature Tomorrow

Abstract

77 I met a very competent ex-student the other day, now a lecturer in a well respected ‘new’ university, who said that he and his cohort were very excited by the new idea of teaching not national literature, nor comparative literature, but World Literature! I was obliged to laugh, however sympathetically, at this deja-vu experience. As comparatists know, the term Weltliteratur is hardly ‘new’; it was of course coined by Goethe in the early nineteenth century and referred then, as it still refers today, to literature that has survived the ordeal of translation and is hence able to speak to audiences across the barriers of language and even culture. Like such illuminating rediscoveries, the ‘crisis in comp lit’ is endemic and recurrent. It may be a sign of health as much as of threatened decay; for whatever its successes, because of its inability (by its very nature) to achieve complete independence, any successes are claimed or siphoned off by its own constituent parts. It could only achieve independence at the cost of its essential parts, the national and regional languages and literatures. To attain independence – by, for example, becoming the translated substance of a series of abandoned local habitations and names – would spell disaster. The ‘natural’ hegemony of English and English departments today poses a powerful threat; yet as it becomes more all-encompassing, abandons its own sacred nooks and crannies, and embraces ‘world’ literature, it at the same time reopens the door to enterprising explorers of the actual languages and cultures behind the translated pabulum. An Indian student from Calcutta came to see me recently; she was a specialist in Canadian aboriginal languages. Soon the once familiar European languages may become as rare and enticing. If the verities, and the endemic crises, of comparative literary studies have merely shifted gear into ‘world’ mode, what has become of the intellectual structures known as ‘theory’ that dominated all literary studies for a time? These were hardly unique to comparative