“The Notion of World Literature and its Stakes in the

Context of Cultural Globalisation”

Didier Coste
Michel de Montaigne University, Bordeaux
and University of Sfax (Tunisia)

[I want, first of all, to express my deep gratitude to all those persons and institutions who
brought me here to lecture in a new environment: namely to Dra Joana Ormundo of the
UNIP for the kind offer of this lecture room, to the UNB and the Literature Departments
of the other two universities for their participation, to Mme Martine Dorance and the
SCAC, of the French Embassy for its generous support and the Alliance Française for its
help, and finally to my friend Dr Ana Luisa Vidigal Soares de Andrade who has spared
no effort to make this visit, my first to Brasilia, not only possible and perfectly timed, but
thoroughly enjoyable. The sense of hospitality has not been lost here. My thanks also to
the audience for bearing with me in an imperial vernacular and on a rather theoretical
topic of which I am trying to offer a synthetic but not oversimplified view. This is one of
the last, for the time being, of a fairly long series of lectures, conference papers, articles
and review articles dealing with the contemporary culture of globalisation, very often in
an Indian context, but with Hispanic America, Australia and various parts of the
Francophone world also in mind. More people than I can name have helped me shape and
reshape my approach over the last six years.]
‘World literature’ is not an object but a problem, and a problem which calls for a
new critical method,” writes the Italo-American Comparative Literature scholar Franco
Moretti. This audience will perhaps not be overpleased that I bring from my distant
shores to the center of Brazil yet another convoluted theoretical puzzle rather than some
solid ready-to-serve answers to the all-too-visible outgrowth of unspecific architecture in
this town, for example. As I am writing these introductory lines, I can see from the
panoramic window of my ground floor room, across the fast moving traffic of a six lanes
road, the silo-like light grey concrete structure of a ‘Hotel Nacional’ that no-one would
believe to deserve this name if it were not written on its flank in very large letters. When
I first saw it, and still now after a few hours, I had a very strong feeling that the prefix
“Inter” was omitted from the hotel sign for some obscure reason. In this case part of the
answer may be provided by the telecommunication dishes and other metallic devices
which grace the roof of another building at a right angle to ‘Hotel Nacional’. Between
logo, proper name and descriptive denotators, our substantive world is eaten away on all
edges by the onslaught of purely symbolic self-referral. ‘World literature’ is one of these
inflated, outwardly fleshy, multi-purpose expressions (“one size fits all”) that we should
investigate closely in order not to be taken in too easily by the alluring catalogue of the
achievements of postmodern liberalism: “Hotel Nacional, yet another realization of
Jones, Lang, Wooton Pty Ltd International, builders of your future”. My approach will
thus be explicitly historical and semiotic and implicitly psychoanalytic. Mutatis mutandis
—times have changed since the mid 50s, haven’t they— you will recognize a critical
attitude, a way of constructing the object to be deconstructed, rather close to that of
Roland Barthes in his Mythologies. In other terms, I propose in the first instance to treat
‘world literature’ as a ‘myth’ in the Barthesian sense, which does not imply that it is an
Didier Coste

empty sign, but on the contrary an overdetermined sign, and consequently brimming with
both overt and hidden effects on the mode of thinking of its users.

When we use this relatively recent noun-phrase, ‘world literature’, its two
components undergo various shifts of meaning that it will be my first objective to
analyse. Thus “literature” in ‘world literature’ does not mean the same thing as in
“British literature”, “19th century literature”, or “literature on this topic”; and “world”
does not mean the same as in “world organization”, “world war” or “possible worlds
theory”.
"World literature" may seem a very banal notion to today's students after some
thirty years of World Lit survey courses and World Lit anthologies, especially in the US.
The literary education most of us over 50 have received or been subjected to, whether in
the so-called West or elsewhere, made nevertheless this totalising idea very remote and
hazy. The Belles Lettres spirit of "classics" and "humanities" was first transported to the
study of national literatures when the literary paradigm evolved towards "literature" with
the Enlightenment and new democratic, or at least non-feudal ideals of government.
Literature for the people, if not of the people and by the people, was a new creed made
necessary by a transfer of sovereignty from god-given leaders to the people, however
abstract and narrow in its actual flesh and bone contents the people could be. In fact such
a transfer could not be effected without much increased territorialisation when compared
with the power model of the Ancien Régime and especially the one that applied in the
Middle Ages; that power model, particularly in the Christian and Islamic worlds,
associated the undefined and potentially unlimited spatial extension of the spiritual,
divine Empire with a personal delegation of civil and military power to members of
families chosen by Providence. The fusion and confusion of spiritual and earthly power,
the overarching model of the Book, repository of the verb of God as transmitted through
His son or his prophet, turned territory, even particular languages spoken here and there
into secondary identity vectors. Even as we reread the Chanson de Roland, a
propagandistic story of male heroic feats meant to incite the vulgus to enrol in the
Crusades, that Romantics and post-romantics have tried to redefine as France's
foundational epic, we cannot but realize that ‘sweet France’ isn't a geographical, a
linguistic or cultural entity there, but rather a conglomerate of ethnic, tribal and religious
forces that could be easily transferred from one particular area to another topography as
long as it maintained its autonomy and relative weight on the European, Mediterranean
and Middle Eastern scene of the time. Ecclesia and Empire, and Latin, the lingua franca
of the clerics and the happy few, were not able to rigidly unify a loose constellation of
walled cities, isolated forts, unprotected slave peasants and roaming armed hords that
retained the nomadic habits of their close ancestors. The single unifying factor, where
there was one, religion, was not completely of this world. It is only when the temporal,
pragmatic and the spiritual, interpretive, symbolic powers coincide, instead of just
overlapping to a certain extent or when they are at least concentrated in the same hands
that we can have a single world in any space considered: theocracy and the nation-state
are two of the possible power systems that build unified closed worlds.
In this sense there is an obvious continuity between absolute monarchy ‘by the
grace of God’ and the democracy of “the people”, both of them tend to eradicate regional
languages and absorb cultural diversity under bureaucratic standardization. In so far as

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 The Notion of World Literature and its Present Stakes

literature is social self-representation, it is defined in opposition to other cultures under

these conditions where the notion of world is self-centred, ipsistic, identitarian. This is
why, in view of the pressure of tradition and the call to roots and ancestry (more mythical
than real), a French student of the fifties and early sixties of the past century still studied
Latin language, literature and civilization, on the one hand, French language, literature
and history, on the other hand, on a more or less equal footing, depending on his/her
social class and schooling system, and one or two foreign languages, at a much lower
level, with only a smattering of foreign literature and civilization, on the other hand. How
did I become a Comparative Literature scholar? In rebellion. When I was in 5th form, we
were once given an essay to write on “the fable”. I spent a couple of weeks on it, reading
Aesopic, Indian, creole and Spanish fables, as well as Florian, I wrote sixteen pages on
the genre of the fable, taking into account all these fables. I was failed. My French
teacher of French humiliated me publicly in class: “Mr Coste, here you are in France
studying French for the French high school examination; when the topic is “the fable”, it
means the French fable, and the French fable is La Fontaine, only La Fontaine is on the
syllabus.”
At first I thought that physically crossing boundaries would be a sure way of
escaping the prison of nation and national culture, but I have lived to discover that 1) I
needed a national passport to cross national borders, 2) I needed to hide my original
passport to be accepted by and into another culture, but a renegade will always remain
suspicious, and 3) I needed to renew my original passport to re-enter the country I had
left. Even today the condition of the truly comparative, transnational scholar, is an uneasy
burden to carry; we are only tolerated or, but rarely, praised, as long as we fulfil certain
functions that we reprove: we are strongly encouraged to act as cultural-political-
economic propagandists of whichever nation whose passport we bear; we may also be
useful as ‘specialists’ of other, foreign cultures, informers who know these cultures from
inside, or as fresh observers able to nuance the myopic point of view of the connoisseur.
Unfortunately, unlike most diplomats, the cosmopolitan comparatist may hold more than
one passport, his/her country of residence is uncertain, he/she is not a mono-specialist of
any national culture, and he/she never stays long enough anywhere to become a real
insider, or lands anywhere without some previous knowledge. We are useless to the
nation or the society of nations. What are we good at and good to? Should we and can we
endorse one-world, universalist ideologies, whether “imperial” or oecumenical? Should
we and can we become alternative global village gurus, world-wide prophets from
abroad?

The notion of “world literature” can only be understood historically, all the more
since, in spite of its first appearance in the early 19th century, it remains an emergent or
emerging notion to this day, with the following characteristics:
— it has never been institutionalised as a discipline, with its own object, methods and
prerequisites; as you will have deducted it from my introductory words, the closest
discipline would be “Comparative Literature”, but, unlike mathematics, philosophy,
biology or English, Comparative Literature is not only in a state of perpetual ‘crisi’”, it is
both marginal and incomplete, it is not taught or studied all over the world, and where it
is actually taught and/or studied, its scope, its coverage is very rarely universal in practice
or even in principle;
— contrary to aesthetics, ethnology, linguistics and sociology, other epistemological

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Didier Coste

formations that appeared between the late 18th and the late 19th century, the concept has
not only undergone major revisions or revolutions, it is essentially, constitutionally
unstable, oscillating between sum and total, between a mere shapeless adding up of
differences within a kind, an unstructured set, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, a
reductive standardisation, the forced shrinking of literary thought to the dimensions of a
few humanistic (or agonistic) invariants hastily bundled together in order to show a
façade of unity. The present terminology in several Western languages (especially
English and Romance languages) reflects this instability: “world literature” is competing
not only with “global”, “universal”, “general” and “planetary” literature, but with
(unqualified) Literature itself;
— as all notions in the humanities and the social sciences, ‘world literature’ is
historically dependent in two ways: under circumstances such as those of the Greek city,
the Roman or the Muslim Empires, or Indian princely states, it could not be named or
then it would refer to no actual state of things; secondly, its contents in terms of objects
—corpus— and value —canon— (i.e. works, styles, genres, discourses, languages and
modes of communication and interpretation), vary with historical perspective and
historiographical techniques; for instance it may or may not include oral literatures, the
multimedia, very ancient or immediately contemporary productions; but like some
notions and unlike some others, ‘world literature’, once in circulation, becomes a
currency and merchandise with a strong impact on cultural economy, it is thus highly
political.
Thus, after recalling, very sketchily, a few steps in the historical appearance,
evolution and fate of the notion, I shall propose for general discussion the key question of
the ethics of world literature in the present context of cultural globalisation. When I say
‘cultural’ in the expression ‘cultural globalisation’ I do not take it in the sense of high or
courtly culture, or even in the still narrow sense of artistic, relatively autonomous, non-
utilitarian productions of the mind, but in the much broader and political sense of the
interface between matter, sense and image, between material culture, representation of
the human condition and symbolic value.

My main presuppositions are declared as follows:

— From its first steps dating back at least to the 16th century till now, cultural
globalisation appears to have taken several different forms, sometimes successively and
sometimes concurrently; all of them are linked to colonization in one way or another,
which means that the modern notion of world literature naturally belongs with
postcolonial theory and criticism. Nevertheless, cultural globalisation should not be seen
exclusively as a one-way process by which a powerful, ‘central’ Europe, first, than the
‘West’ (including especially the United States, Canada and Australia), then the
industrially developed world at large, brought and imposed their manners, discourses,
values and modes of communication to the weaker, dominated, colonized other. Although
borders between centre and periphery were and remain asymmetrical, the very fact that
borders could be drawn instead of a chasm made them porous and appropriation takes
place both ways in all colonial situations. Misrepresentation maybe intentional or not, but
even when it is vicious, it remains part of a process of appropriation of the other, unless it
negates the humanity of the other and provides its rationale to physical and cultural
elimination. Misrepresentation, just the same as mistranslation, is a creative and
necessary part of intercultural communication and the extension of a dialogic network

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 The Notion of World Literature and its Present Stakes

across the planet.

— In the post-Enlightenment context of globalisation as well as in pre-Enlightenment
large regional networks of economic, cultural and religious power, literacy has played a
key role. The two religions which have expanded all over the world and now threaten to
split it in two antagonistic camps as they once did in the Mediterranean are religions of
the book. The printing press and the European invasion of the Americas date back to the
same period. The birth of modern journalism coincides not so much with democracy as
with the second colonial wave. The written word, notably in print and in the aestheticised
form that we now call literature is an indirect, deferred and capitalistic mode of
communication. Writing and reading certainly individualize verbal communication as
they make it open to the public, but we could also say that literature disguises collective
speech in the form of private expression (expression as an individual member of human
kind, not as a sample of a particular community). Writing back was and remains one of
the major weapons for the Empire (in the sense of the colonies) to strike back at the
metropolis. And this happened quite early in most colonial situations. In this sense we
could risk the hypothesis that there is no such thing as a literature that wouldn’t be
‘world’ literature; in other terms literature was born with its inbuilt world dimension. It
doesn’t mean however that it is redundant to consider it specifically as ‘world literature’,
and this for two key reasons: 1) the world dimension is still ignored or denied by most
exponents and students of so-called national literatures or even by all those comparative
readers who label ‘foreign’ literatures all those other than the one produced where they
sit; 2) depending on the sense and value of ‘world’ in ‘world literature’, the role and fate
of literature itself may change completely.
I shall outline a few examples of the adjective use of ‘world’ in phrases that do
not refer to literature, but all these uses are found in the rich and dangerous polysemy of
“world literature”, both connotative and denotative. If “world lit” works so well, it is
because its disambiguation is not the order of the day.
World car, world market, world cup, worldwide network, musics of the world. A
world car is a model designed without a particular automotive culture in view, it will be
produced under the same or a different name in two or more distant parts of the world
and can grossly fulfil the expectations of very distinct segments of the market. In a world
cup, selected teams wearing the colours of as many nations as possible compete for a
trophy. A worldwide network is defined in terms of horizontal coverage and vertical
reach. Songs of the world amount to exotic folklore, they are sounds and words that one
does not expect to hear in one’s native cultural context: such as, for us, recordings of
Balinese bells or Maori war chants. Similarly, world literature can point to Harry Potter
or alternatively to the “best” literature ever produced by all nations (literature of “world
standard”, qualitatively competitive on the world market), it can point to literature that
circulates in whatever form (including samizdat or cult reading) in several parts of the
world, and it can also refer to a literary corpus unearthed, transcribed, edited, translated,
etc. for the enjoyment of an audience which had never been its own in the first place.

When Weltliteratur was first formulated by Goethe in the 1820s, it was definitely
with the acquisition of wisdom and knowledge in mind, Germany was not a nation-sate,
let alone a colonial power; the project of opening the literary canon to include important
Eastern works, Chinese and Indian in particular, could not be meant either to subjugate
these cultures by gaining a certain knowledge of them or as purely disinterested

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Didier Coste

judgement, philanthropic generosity. The functions of the emerging notion lay

somewhere else, their ambiguity being reflected in the three-pronged constructive process
of Weltliteratur: was it to be a gallery of classics, a collection of masterworks or simply a
row of open windows to a panoramic library? David Damrosch, in his introduction to
What is World Literature?, rightly insists on the fact that the emerging notion is marked
by its dialogic character and a floating chronotope in the relation between ideology and
territory; on the one hand, in the Conversations, the two personalities, generations and
social classes of Goethe and Eckermann meet without melting smoothly together; on the
other hand, Goethe’s position in geopolitical space and historical time is both central and
median, hinging on a turning point between a European pre-national attitude and nation-
building, and minoritarian in so far as German culture was not at the time fully integrated
and central on the European cultural map. The famous statement about the grandeur of
the Chinese novel when German tribes were still roaming the forests clad in animal skins
is emblematic of this uneasy situation. The uncertain nature of the ‘world literature work’
remains treacherous almost two centuries later. According to Damrosch, it is the very
interpretive flexibility of a text, its liability to alternate readings, its ability to be radically
recontextualised that makes it a likely candidate to world literature status. We could also
surmise that, at an early stage of globalisation such as Goethe’s moment, a form of
cosmopolitanism, a nomadism of the mind, is doubly involved in the emergence of World
Literature; not being settled in a well-defined institutionalised territory lets the aesthetic
subject roam the earth in search of the contrasting community features and constitutive
anthropological shared ground that will build identity; at the same time, the discourses
and world visions (Weltanschauungen) put to play in the process draw ever wider circles
around world models, endlessly reconfigure literary space.
The question we must ask today is: at the other end of two centuries of both
imperialist and defensive nationalisms that have provided the mental shaping of an
incredibly violent and abject History, is there room and relevance for an attitude similar
to Goethe’s in his post-feudal but still largely pre-nationalistic historical moment and
localisation? In a sense, this is what might be suggested by Erich Auerbach’s initial
statement in his now famous seminal article “Philologie der Weltliteratur” (1952),
translated into English by Edward Said in 1969 and later considered as one of the corner
stones of what would become known as ‘Postcolonial Studies’: “What is certain is that
our philological fatherland is the earth; it can no longer be the nation”. Was Auerbach
right, but much too early, or did his predictive power fail him when he tried hard to
counterbalance his objective pessimism after WW2? The nation(s) is/are still constantly
named by most Comparative Literature and Postcolonial scholars: sometimes as the
adequate frame in which to compare literary works and study their intertextuality and
interdiscursivity, circulation, transfer, mutual or unilateral influence, etc.; sometimes, but
more rarely, to transcend, negate or deny this frame. When American archnationalism
(“united we stand [above the rest of the world]”) is given as a model of democratic
development to crusade for in wars with no physical contact (body to body fight), no
ground battles, in which only aliens will be eliminated (zero loss on our side), it would be
healthy to doubt which sense to give a hypothetical “postnational condition”. Are we
operating and bound to survive in a world irreversibly marked by 19th century
nationalism (concomitant with the Western slicing up of the rest of the world cake)? Is
the nationalist model superseded by its own paradoxical success in the form of American
world hegemony? Is it simply taking slightly modified forms in a redistribution of forces

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 The Notion of World Literature and its Present Stakes

after the fall of communism, through the rise of still fragile but threatening new
superpowers: China, India, the Arab and Muslim world vying with the US, the European
Union and Japan, for hegemony or at least a privileged position in an oligopolistic
system, while entire continents and countless minority enclaves remain left out from the
sphere of power, coveted objects or indifferent battlegrounds? Or yet can we reasonably
situate ourselves in some sort of pre- or proto-planetary speculative space where the
literatures of the world would not only be re-read for their archival value but would
become an infinitely rich source of whole world prototypes?
A few years after his enlightening Turkish experience as a refugee from Nazi
Germany, Auerbach, once established in the United States and seeing through the
superficial antagonism of the two blocks in the Cold War, was growing more and more
pessimistic about the future of diversity, very much in the same vein as some of his
contemporaries, Jewish or not, of slightly later generations (the French thinker Georges
Friedmann, for example). In his eyes, the ‘local’ was threatened of extinction, at least as
the ground roots of literary production and interpretation:
“Our earth, which is the world of World literature, is shrinking and losing its diversity.
[…] the lifestyles of people across the whole planet are becoming increasingly uniform.
First initiated in Europe, the stratification process spreads, burying all particular
traditions.” (A25)

and again, a few pages further in the same essay:

“the concept of World literature we are fighting for […] considers as inevitable the
current standardisation process of planetary civilisation.” (A29)

When Damrosch stresses ”the strength of patterning by local contexts”, he wishes “to
distinguish world literature from a nominally ‘global’ literature which could be read only
in airport terminals, one impermeable to any context whatsoever.” (DD p. ??) He is thus
undoubtedly resisting standardization at the ultimate stage of the numeric age, light years
away from its prefiguration by Walter Benjamin’s meditation on “Art in the Age of its
Mechanical Reproduction”. Clearly three different visions of the size of the present world
and its impending future are playing their part in this crucial debate, determinant for any
political action regarding the preservation and promotion of cultural diversity and
innovation through verbal art:
— Some, like Auerbach and Georges Friedmann half a century ago, see an ever smaller
world in the sense that physical distance is reduced by ever increasing speed in
communication and transport (with the new high speed train, Marseille is now only 4
hours from Paris; MSN Messenger and Skype video-conferencing let us discuss our lunch
menu in ‘real time’ wherever we are on earth, and soon, in the sky). As a consequence,
we all use the same language (world English), the same operating systems (Windows),
the same clothing and facial expression codes (smileys), and we share the same non-
material values (financial services, non-denominational spiritual guidance). In the global
village there is an instant solution for all your needs.
— Some other thinkers, on the contrary, can rejoice that the world gets bigger and bigger
because sealed roads are built to remote jungles, new air routes to the tiniest Pacific
islands are opened every day by hard discount air carriers, Die-hard IV is released in the
heart of Africa even before it has filled movie theatres in Los Angeles, and even I who
cannot dive can observe the reproductive behaviour of paleontological fish several

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Didier Coste

thousand metres under the surface of the sea; panoptic madness is duly supplemented by
infinite interpretation and unlimited hypertextual expansion. This world is an ongoing
(ad)venture, it started small in the Middle Ages, it’s getting bigger and better all the time,
big is beautiful.

Even discounting that the earth has not grown bigger or smaller, just more
inhospitable for billions of impoverished, famished or otherwise disinherited people
kicked out of their ancestral pastures or rice paddies, or treading on foot across a desert
towards the nearest refugee camp, can we imagine a third, alternative world vision that
would make ‘world literature’ less disastrous and less of a panacea, therefore more real,
if it is true that we have to live with it from now on?
At least three models are or could be proposed, none of them completely
satisfactory. I’ll list them by increasing order of desirability, the third one being my own
(partial and tentative) suggestion at this time:

1 – The planetarian model (Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak). The word ‘planetarian’ is an

obvious portmanteau creation, duly mixing planetary and proletarian to stress the kind of
authoritarian multicommunitarianism Spivak has been advocating for a number of years,
the often scientifically confused but politically radical exposition of which culminated in
2003 with her pamphlet Death of a Discipline. To summarise, a grossly distorted and
ungenerous version of Derridean deconstruction serves as theoretical/philosophical
foundation for dismissing the discipline of Comparative Literature as, according to her, it
was built in the United States by European migrants and refugees such as Auerbach and
René Wellek. A Eurocentric discipline, based on philological tradition and paying closer
attention to the text than to its uses and contexts, its time is over and it is urgent to devise
a “New Comparative Literature” that would blend literary reading with Cultural Studies
and Subaltern Studies —actually subjecting the former to the latter. Spivak’s key tenet,
borrowed from hardliner revolutionary Marxism, is that communities (communities of
living, at both the material and symbolic cultural levels) cannot be correctly represented
but by themselves. Accordingly, anthropological unity is only presupposed to allow
mutually unrepresentable communities to fight jointly for the perpetuation of their
respective unintelligibility. If we could devise a slogan for Spivakism, it could well be
“Communitarians of the world, unite”. Translation, although Spivak is prone to
introducing herself as a translator (of Derrida’s Grammatology, when she was young, of
Mahasweta Devi in her later years), would then become an exercise in absurdity,
ultimately proving that the spirit of a community is untransferable. On the other hand,
endless deconstruction provides a kind of discursive unity to criticism, reducing the
actual initiative of speech communities to a pre-text for autobiographical ravings and
self-enhancement on the part of the critic-cum-theorist.

2 - The glocal model. This other neologism, also a cross of two antithetical words, in this

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case ‘global’ and ‘local’, was apparently coined in the late 80s by some Japanese
marketing analyst and later reused by American theorists of globalisation. Lois Parkinson
Zamora as late as 20021 thought that it was “unlikely to catch on”, but it has. The general
idea is that, since globalisation is “a venerable process”, the ratio of ‘global’ and ‘local’
in cultural products and their apprehension have varied with its progress and setbacks, but
lately
the processes of globalisation tend to detach cultural formations from national territories
in ways that undermine the territorial coincidence of language, culture, and nation. This
development involves the (re)conceptualisation of space […]:the ratios of local and
global are no longer clearly fixed, and familiar distinctions between "here" and "there"
are unstable, if not gone.2

I would like to note that, rather than a state of affairs of which we could take a blurry
snapshot, due to a lack of definition of cultural space, ‘glocal’ could and should perhaps
be taken itself as the unstable result of a dynamics of ‘glocalisation’ by which local
cultural sites of varying size and nature respond to globalisation, adapt and rebel at the
same time. Mestizaje could be seen as part and parcel of globalisation, and certain forms
of reactive hybridity, of glocalisation. My favourite example is what becomes of a
MacDonald’s fast food outlet on a modern plaza in New Delhi when large buffalo cows
are ruminating in front of the shop window where vegetarian instead of ground beef
hamburgers are sold to Hindu customers. Wherever the Macdonald company can only
gain its small share of the age-old Indian fast food market by selling food for cows
instead of cow meat, or used camping cars are recycled as living quarters for hens, as in
Baja California, a process of glocalisation is taking place. The same applies to hand-
printed poems on a famous footballer in Brazil or to One Hundred years of solitude
shelved as Indian fiction by a major bookshop in Calcutta. Nevertheless, due to the
‘floating ratio’ of local and global in an undefined space subject to constant reshaping,
glocalisation may be considered as an open door to the inflation of the global and the
effacement of the local. Oral memory can be erased beyond recovery by its very
inscription and mechanical recording; when it is later reconstructed by modern
techniques instead of being transmitted by masters of the trade from generation to
generation, it becomes recognisable only as representation and voluntary role playing, no
longer as a rite whose meaning is contained in its own practice.

3 – Comparative universalism. The notion of ‘world literature’ has always been the
object at the heart of the ancient but ever more virulent opposition between
‘universalism’ and cultural relativism. Some balance could be kept between these two
attitudes as long as the nation (at the cost, it is true, of neglecting non national minorities
and transnational cultural units) appeared to be the natural, almost biological frame in
______________________________

1 - <http://clcwebjournal.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb02-3/zamora02.html>
2 - Ibid.

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Didier Coste

which to apprehend literary texts and their reception. This is why even Gustave Lanson
could be accepted in the circle of early European comparatists in the first years of the 20th
century. But, after WW1, which had already inflicted a severe blow, the exaltation of
nationalism into a totally exclusive genocidal enterprise, the multiplication of civil wars
within well-established nations such as Russia and Spain, the extension of the national
model to all sorts of localities which were hitherto supposed to constitute prime examples
of other models of community —tribal, clanic, casteist, feudal, etc.— and the claims to
nationhood of so many minorities as well as the uncountable victims of colonial
oppression eventually had the better of that already fragile and contrived balance.
The age-old confrontation of universalism and relativism, which used to be
limited to the fields of ethics and aesthetics, i.e. to matters of judgment and deliberate
action, has thus invaded the domain of literature and language in the wake of the
encyclopaedic, imperial and panoptic thrust brought by the Enlightenment. Non-
European scholars, writers and cultural activists have seen the hand of Western colonial
and imperialist domination in various universalist models used to frame deterritorialized
literary studies required by spreading and ever faster globalisation in all aspects of human
life (and ecology); many of these scholars, such as Aijaz Ahmad, think that dominated
and minority literatures were being assimilated in the process, reduced to mere
appendages or inferior imitations and annexes of the Western canon. They do not want
‘third-world’, ‘southern’ or peripheral cultures, very superficially apprehended, typified
and caricatured, to become mere fodder for Western theorists, raw material for the
Western cultural industry.
Globalisation, in its positive and rewarding aspects as well as in its more sinister
facets consists in several distinct phenomena at once, some of which at least work as
pairs of opposites likely to create great tensions and torsions in the system: an
exponential increase in communication is coupled with a standardization of practices and
protocols, the acknowledgement of (sometimes irreconcilable) difference on the part of
the actors of intercultural communication is coupled with the rejection of difference for
the sake of communicability, and so on.
Conversely, we must stress that postulating, as radical relativism does, the
incommensurability of the literatures of the world contradictorily involves recognizing
that they all belong to a single category of cultural objects and practices. Levels of
heterogeneity can only be perceived within a set that implies one or more shared features.
Basically, World literature and its universals are not constructed differently from the
tiniest national literature. The violent rejection of any form of humanism, universalism or
cosmopolitanism by radical relativists who generally hold several passports and teach
Humanities in Anglophone universities to graduate students from all over the world could
be seen as mere hypocrisy, but it is worse than that: “don’t touch my identity, don’t
remap my territory, leave us/them alone” are exactly the same exclusive words that the
hateful leaders of rightist and racist metropolitan political parties will use to expel third-
world migrants from the first world metropolis.
I therefore propose to Comparative Literature this new task and field of study that
I call “comparative universalism”: instead of laboriously seeking from a single cultural or
theoretical point of view what all other literary cultures might share between them and
share with “us”, whoever we are, we could ask them how they see and project themselves
as universal. They often do so explicitly. Terrorist US universalism is not the only one
and it has not yet won its war against cultural and political pluralism. Historically, (exo-

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 The Notion of World Literature and its Present Stakes

and esoteric) universalisms conveyed by literary forms and their corresponding poetics
are legion. Thinking of the long 19th century, transcendentalist writing, with its unique
mixture of genres, Comtian positivism, rising internationalist socialism, with the birth of
realist and naturalist fiction, or yet the reformist, non-dualist Brahmo Hinduism, with its
great literary production from Tagore to post-Gandhian developments, are all
universalisms that we could and should investigate comparatively. It is, in my opinion,
one of the best ways to turn World Literature from a threat to literature and freedom into
the promise of fairer, stimulating and creative intercultural exchange.

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