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Where Is World Literature Now? Conversations over Time and across Space

2017; Penn State University Press; Volume: 54; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/complitstudies.54.3.0667

1528-4212

Allen Hibbard,

Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies

“What are we to make of world literature today?” David Damrosch asks toward the beginning of his introduction to the recently published anthology, World Literature in Theory. Taken together, Damrosch's anthology and Rebecca Walkowitz's critical study Born Translated provide occasion to reflect on how the fields of Comparative Literature and World Literature have developed and where they now are. A number of themes and concerns emerge in these works: a challenge to distinct national literary traditions and increasing attention to interactions between traditions; ways in which texts travel and circulate in new contexts; debates about depth and breadth of knowledge (expertise and dilettantism) within fields of study; the relative power of particular languages and literary traditions within the context of global capitalism; possible ideological and political meanings associated with the designation “world literature”; ways to resist tendencies to domesticate foreign texts as they move from one context to another; debates over “universalism”; and the essential role of translation as an enterprise that makes texts accessible to other linguistic communities (what is translated, into what languages, why, and to what effect).Anthologies, such as the one Damrosch has compiled, bring together key statements in one place and time, allowing readers to see issues and trends, and trace conversations over time, across space. An anthology helps consolidate a field and circumscribes a body of work deemed essential for the field. Starting points matter, as Edward Said reminds us in Beginnings: Intention and Method; they launch particular trajectories, foreclosing and facilitating certain perspectives. Heading off the lineup here is an account of Goethe's well-known statements on world literature, recorded by Eckermann. Indeed, many of the subsequent pieces refer to Goethe's notion of Weltliteratur, suggesting limitations to Goethe's views and noting possible similarities between that historical moment and ours. René Etiemble, for instance, in “Should We Rethink the Notion of World Literature?” acknowledges that “because the concept of Weltliteratur was coined in German (and by what a German!) it has always retained, at least for certain people, the taint of a germanocentrism” (87). Nevertheless, he maintains, we must not retreat from ventures to transcend prejudices of birth and should seek to understand traditions other than those with which we are comfortable, fully aware of limitations. And in “To World, to Globalize: World Literature's Crossroads,” Djelal Kadir, attending to challenges of “globalization” in our own historical moment, submits that “not unlike Goethe, we are still straining to interrogate and chart the multivalent space that encompasses and that is encompassed by what we call the world, a space where the local and the global continue to contend” (267). In the epilogue, “The Changing Concept of World Literature,” Zhang Longxi returns to Goethe, arguing that there is now “a much greater need to open one's eyes beyond the tunnel vision of one's own group or community, and a much greater readiness to embrace alterity beyond one's linguistic and cultural comfort zones …” (515).While there might be nearly unanimous agreement among authors included in this volume on the value of seeking knowledge of world literatures, there is considerable debate and discussion regarding how we should proceed, how to negotiate the challenges and land mines. Stephen Owen (“Stepping Forward and Back”) serves up the tempting, readily digestible metaphor of the “food court” for thinking about the operation of world literature, where there is room for a limited number of national cuisines, each with its own representative dish, acceptable to domestic palates. Franco Moretti presents a method of “distance reading,” based on systems theory, that tracks and accounts for (unequal) exchanges and flows. In such an approach, attention is focused not on reading all available texts from all cultures (an impossible task) but on relationships between texts—“devices, themes, tropes—or genres and systems” (162) involving a “compromise between foreign form and local materials” (163). Similarly, Pascale Casanova attempts to describe the nature of world literature as a system under the now well-known phrase “world republic of literature.” An essay by Alexander Beecroft raises useful, convincing critiques of both Casanova and Moretti.In any consideration of World Literature, what becomes available to “the world” and the extent to which things circulate becomes an important consideration, as Etiemble and others note. The growing body of work in Translation Studies (whose growth has paralleled that of World Literature) thus figures prominently in the creation and operation of world literature. Susan Bassnett's essay, “From Cultural Turn to Translational Turn: A Transnational Journey” (2011), is key here, describing the development of Translation Studies over the past several decades. No longer is translation taken for granted. What is more, literatures no longer are seen as autonomous units; rather, literary history displays a dynamic process of infusions, imports/exports, porousness, and circulation of texts as they move from one national/linguistic context to another. Gisèle Sapiro's “Globalization and Cultural Diversity in the Book Market: The Case of Translations in the US and in France” (2010) provides figures and outlines trends on how many works (from identified source languages) are translated, primarily from English into other languages and from other languages into French and English. As limited and incomplete as these data are, they do suggest certain patterns and flows. For instance: “The more a language is central, the smaller the share of translations in its book production” is one conclusion reached (211).A number of essays in the volume address and seek to redress Western hegemony in the field of World Literature. Revathi Krishnaswamy's “Toward World Literary Knowledges” argues for inclusion of non-Western material, submitting an approach that embraces “world literary knowledges,” with room for “emergent literary knowledge” (of which Dalit literature is mentioned as an example). Michael Chapman (“An Idea of Literature: South Africa, India, the West”) similarly draws attention to South–South dynamics as a means of decentering or offsetting Western dominance. Tania Franco Carvalhal (“Cultures and Contexts”) draws our attention to cultural and literary connections between Latin America and Europe (in particular, Paris). Aamar Mufti (“Orientalism and the Institution of World Literatures”) offers an interesting historical account of how Urdu and Hindi (within the contours of colonial power) rose to prominence as preeminent languages associated with distinct religious ideologies. Ronit Ricci's essay “Islamic Literary Networks in Southeast Asia” examines relationships between Tamil, Java, Malay, and Arabic, while Karen Thornber (“East Asia and the Literary Contact Nebulae”) explores interactions between Chinese, Korean, Taiwanese, and Japanese, asserting: “It is clear that despite its recent advances and burgeoning popularity, the field of world literature must continue to adopt more pluralistic understandings of literatures, cultures, and nations” (461).Other pieces in the anthology deserve mention. A few essays (including a statement by Nicolas Sarkozy) address the debate surrounding Francophone literature and its relation to French literature, as well as World Literature. (One might want more here on the power of English.) And two short pieces (one by Melekh Ravitsh and another by Borekh Rivkin) speak to the status of Yiddish in the modern world. In addition, the anthology contains classic gems such as Tagore on World Literature, Said's “Traveling Theory” and Borges' “The Argentine Writer and Tradition.” Noteworthy, too, is the conversation between Damrosch and Gayatri Spivak (from a plenary session for the 2011 ACLA conference) that stages various issues and points of debate in the field. Near the outset of his remarks, Damrosch lays out “three intertwined problems”—“that the study of world literature can very readily become culturally deracinated, philologically bankrupt, and ideologically complicit with the worst tendencies of global capitalism” (365).Walkowitz's study of the contemporary Anglophone novel brings the issue of translation front and center. “How does translation shape the narrative structure of the contemporary novel?” she asks at the outset (4), asserting that “Translation is the engine rather than the caboose of literary history” (5) and that “a focus on translation and contact among languages … implies new scales of literary history and new principles of literary belonging” (44). Referring to theoretical work featured in the Damrosch anthology, Walkowitz posits that “whereas world literature once referred to a group of ‘works,’ it now refers to a ‘network,’ a ‘system,’ a ‘republic’ or a problem” (29). She is particularly interested in how works written in English often include material that in an “original” context was in another language. This may involve texts written in other languages with translation (often into English) in mind, texts simultaneously—or nearly simultaneously—published in more than one language (an example she provides is J.M. Coetzee's Diary of a Bad Year), or works written in English that incorporate conversations between characters or documents that occur in other languages. Her approach thus disrupts designations of “original” and “translation,” “native” and “foreign.” Indeed, Walkowitz advances discussions in the field by identifying and analyzing this phenomenon. She also rewards her readers with discussions of a rich and impressive array of material by writers such as Coetzee, Junot Díaz, Jonathan Safran Foer, Mohsin Hamid, Kazuo Ishiguro, Jamaica Kincaid, Ben Lerner, China Miéville, David Mitchell, Walter Mosley, Caryl Phillips, Adam Thirlwell, and Amy Waldman. Celebrating the mobility of global writers, this study also (perhaps unwittingly and inevitably) reinforces the place of English as lingua franca, dominant, at the center. We might well ask ourselves (as some of the readings in the theory anthology encourage us to do) what does not cross the threshold of translation, what (due to market systems, status of various languages, lack of skilled translators, difficulty of texts, etc.) does not make its way into English, from one language to another.In “born translated” works “our interpretive energies shift rather than dissipate” (49) as we become aware of difference, even within English. In discussions of the wide range of authors mentioned earlier, Walkowitz attends to various ways in which writers have adopted new strategies to represent or respond to this global scene. For instance, of Mitchell's Number9Dream, she writes: “[H]e creates the impression of a translated book and implies that we are reading a translation within a translation: an English-language version of a Japanese-medium novel featuring a character whose life is saturated by the English-language, especially U.S. and U.K. music, fiction, and digital culture” (141). And in a chapter titled “This Is Not Your Language,” she focuses on works by Kincaid and Hamid, both of whom deploy narrators who address English-speaking audiences, “translating” local experience (Antigua, Pakistan) for reader/interlocutor, acting as “local informants.” In the process, the purpose is often to disturb and disrupt readers' sensibilities—as they become aware that there will be something out there that will perhaps forever be beyond their reach. The other might not like us, perhaps because we are viewed as complicit in injustice and violence. Kincaid's concern, Walkowitz asserts, is that “U.S. readers need to know more about how other places see themselves; that they need to become less confident about their own knowledge; and that they need to imagine better the various ways that people, commodities, and languages circulate—and do not circulate—throughout the world” (187).In the final chapter, titled “Born Translated and Born Digital,” Walkowitz focuses on the work of Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries, collaborative Web artists who have created works using Flash Player. The very medium, it is proposed, poses new challenges for reader/viewers: “Readers have to focus their attention on the work's episodic structure while also considering how many languages they have before them” (205). Walkowitz presents and analyzes a number of “texts” (HONEYMOON IN BEPPU, TRAVELING TO UTOPIA: WITH A BRIEF HISTORY OF TECHNOLOGY, SAMSUNG, BUST DOWN THE DOORS!, and MORNING OF THE MONGOLOIDS), pointing to various features such as the relationship between fake original and fake translation, and the inability to determine the difference, particularly if one does not know the particular languages involved. What Walkowitz finds especially intriguing is the way the medium allows texts to appear simultaneously in different languages without marks of original or priority, thus redressing imbalances between languages and dramatizing questions of translation. These “born digital” works thus make us face the limits of our knowledge, and realize that readers from different (linguistic) communities will necessarily pick up on different things, and construct their own meanings.Digital issues have become a hot topic in the field, indicated as well by Damrosch's decision to conclude his anthology with Jessica Pressman's “The Strategy of Digital Modernism: Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries' Dakota” (a work to which Walkowitz refers). Pressman's focus is on the influence of Pound's first two cantos on the collaborative duo's work. Both Walkowitz and Pressman draw our attention to relationships between print/digital, modern/postmodern, difficulty/accessibility (degrees of interactivity), (authorial) automomy, mechanisms of global corporate control, circulation, interpretation, and translation. In short, everything comes together here.A shared assumption lying behind World Literature studies is that knowing the “other” will result in getting along better with that other (an assumption that could certainly be challenged). Linguistic variation (all of those different languages!), as well as temporal limits of a biological life span and inherent and contingent inequalities, stands as a central challenge to knowing the totality of literature produced around the world. Hence, the importance of translation. Hence, the importance of communal, collaborative endeavors. Hence, the ethical imperative.