What Counts as World Literature?

Caroline Levine and B. Venkat Mani

On the literary terrain, Kalidasa and Tulasidasa are as much ours as they
belong to the whole world, and Shakespeare, Gorki, Tolstoy belong as much to
their own nations as they belong to us. . . . They belong to everyone because
they belong to each one.—Mahadevi Varma (1975; trans. B. Venkat Mani)

To have access to literature, world literature, was to escape the prison of

national vanity, of philistinism, of compulsory provincialism, of inane school-
ing, of imperfect destinies and bad luck. Literaturewas the passport to enter a
larger hfe; that is, the zone of freedom.—Susan Sontag (2007)

S world literature a canon, a collection, a mode of reading, a Utopian

I dream, an impossibility? Does it dilute a rigorous study of literatures
in their original languages by depending on a glib global marketability
and the smooth currency of translation? Or does an urgent embrace of
the world helpfully push us out of our narrow and parochial reliance
on national literatures? Is world literature simply a prerogative of the
professional reader, the literary theorist, or is it a much larger inter-
active space with numerous actors who range from authors, translators,
and readers to librarians, publishers, collectors, and booksellers?
If these questions evoke the mixed associations often prompted
by world literature — an intellectual ideal, a riiode of reading, a com-
mercial enterprise, a pedagogical resource — then the purpose of this
special issue, "What Counts as World Literature?," is to give an account
of the rnany niodes through which an abstract ideal transforms into an
institutionalized entity. How does world literature become a scholarly
field, a pedagogical resource, a social practice? The aim of this issue is
not to "move beyond" first associations but to reflect collectively on the
complex processes through which world literature acquires its multiple
instantiations in the world. By raising the question "What counts as

Modern Language Quarterly 74:2 (June 2013)

DOI 10.1215/00267929-2073043 © 2013 by University of Washington
 142 . MLQ • June 2013

world literature?," the essays in this issue investigate the history of world
literature as a concept defined, institutionalized, deinstitutionalized,
and reinstitutionalized at different historical moments. And it invites
us to think through this history precisely to chart new directions for
the future.
In many moments of "globalization"—including violent conquests,
imperialism, mercantilism, and multinational commerce—encounters
among cultures and languages have allowed literary texts to circulate
beyond their homelands. Scholars of world literature recognize two
sides to these moments of encounter. On the one hand, these intersec-
tions can be productive, even Utopian, as they prompt an aesthetic kin-
ship among expressive traditions, a global fraternity of readers through
a borderless engagement with literature, an alternative to the collective
narcissism of national literatures, and the recognition of exciting new
hybrid literary forms and genres. On the other hand, these processes
register a painful unevenness as imperial conquest, political censor-
ship, and economic globalization, for example, oppress and subjugate
some literatures while promoting and circulating others. Any attempt
to conceptualize world literature through vague universalist inclusion
must take into account the distribution of material force and political
power.
But how should one do this, exactly? The first years of the twenty-
first centiny have witnessed an explosion of scholarly works on world
literature. World literature as a category does not just expand the
national canon but raises fundamental questions about both literary
objects and literary methods. It asks whether we should place a new
emphasis on certain kinds of texts—"minor" literatures, or texts that
circulate widely, or those that imagine worlds—and it pushes us to con-
sider translation, circulation, and distribution. An interest in world lit-
erature might even require us to abandon close reading, with its stress
on the subtlest linguistic nuances, in favor of world-systems theory and
patterns of global circulation.
If these questions seem urgent in the field, ours is not the first
moment to struggle to define the term world literature, to puzzle over
its parameters, or to worry about global circulation and translation.
Imagination of and engagement with literatures beyond political and
linguistic borders have taken place since antiquity. The first multilin-
Levine and Mani • What Counts as World Literature? 143

gual literary interactions between Sumerian and Akkadian in Mesopo-

tamia in the third millennium (see also Damrosch 2008), the spread of
Sanskrit literatures in South and Southeast Asia in the first millennium
BCE (Pollock 2006), all the way to the circulation of Arabic, Greek,
Hebrew, Persian, and Latin manuscripts and codices in Europe and
Asia during the Middle Ages (Rice 2010) are just a few examples of a
much older worlding of literature. Starting with the early nineteenth
century, however, there have been four major historical flashpoints in
the definition of world literature. At the height of European colonial-
ism in the nineteenth century, many literary works from Asia, Africa,
and Latin America began to circulate as part of a newly global publish-
ing traffic. Goethe, after reading translations of Sanskrit, Persian, and
Chinese literatures—alongside his engagement with works in several
European languages — gave traction to the term Weltliteratur in 1827
(Eckermann 1839; see Dominguez 2012). This has been taken as a
point of origin for the field today. At the end of the nineteenth cen-
tury, with the rise of mass literacy and cheap new forms of publishing,
came a second flashpoint: a flurry of new collections of world litera-
ture for a broad public (e.g., Reclam's Universal-Bibliothek, published in
Leipzig and sold in vending machines in 1912). The first attempts to
circulate world literature en masse through "great books" coincided
with the Great War. The aftermath of the two world wars, the moment
of our third flashpoint, in fact brought a newly urgent sense of the
importance of global cultural understanding, from Erich Auerbach's
Mimesis (1946), which marked the beginning of the discipline of com-
parative literature in the United States, to the explosion of world litera-
ture anthologies in the late 1940s and 1950s. In 1959 the University of
Wisconsin-Madison hosted the first conference in the United States
on the teaching of world literature (Block i960). In 1962 the British
publishing company Heinemann Educational Books launched the Afri-
can Writers Series, starting with what has become a classic of world lit-
erature, Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart (1957). Indeed, the term new
world literature-was used for the first time by Alan Hill (1993: 58), man-
aging editor of the African Writers Series, on the thirtieth anniversary
of the founding of the series. This new world literature—even beyond
Africa—is characteristic of the fourth flashpoint, our own moment,
marked by the escalation of migration and the amplification of techno-
 MLQ • June 2013

logical, financial, and commercial interdependence between nations.

The intensificati.on of cross-cultural and transnational dialogues and
conflicts — captured in innumerable genres and forms of aesthetic
expression in the last three decades—has prompted an outpouring of
scholarly reflections on the limits and possibilities of world literature
as a field, including Pascale Casanova's World Republic of Letters (1999);
David Damrosch's What Is World Literature'? (2003); John Pizer's Idea o
World Literature (2006); the encyclopedic two-volume study The Novel
(2006), edited by Franco Moretti; and a special issue of Comparative
Literature Studies on East-West Asia and world literature (2010), to name
just a few examples. Routledge has recently published a Companion
and a Reader on world literature (D'haen, Damrosch, and Kadir 2012;
D'haen, Dominguez, and Thomsen 2012).
The field is becoming increasingly institutionalized in universities
in the United States and around the world. But the definition of tvorld
literature ^nd the methods we use to approach it remain troublingly
divided. "Old" world literature — in the singular — remains largely
reserved as a repository of the timeless wisdom of the world, the best
representation of the multitude of narrative forms and traditions from
antiquity to the present. "New" world literatures—in the plural—are
often held to encompass contemporary literatures written in and/or
translated into English and other languages of European descent. The
contemporariness of world literatures creates the impression that they
are ephemeral; their multifaceted, purportedly chaotic ambition is
often measured against the timeless value ascribed to representative
works of a national or a linguistic canon assembled under the rubric
"world literature." This special issue, "What Counts as World Litera-
ture?," attends to, points of intersection between these two definitions—
timeless and ephemeral, deeply historical and newly emerging.
Against accusations that world literature homogenizes or waters
down literary experience, this special issue strongly endorses its
global expansiveness. But we do not simply call for a contemporary
geographic inclusiveness, an additive model of ever-increasing literary
diversity. Nor are we satisfied with the addition of hitherto undiscov-
ered theoretical statements on world literature from non-European
literary traditions. While we are enthusiastic about the significance of
such enterprises, we are interested here in understanding how geo-
Levine and Mani • What Counts as World Literature? 145

graphic diversity contributes to a fundamental perspectival shift: what

does it mean for literary readers to imagine our work in and through a
world-literary space? The approaches to world literature that have dom-
inated the past decade have developed four invaluable perspectives: an
emphasis on circulation and reception (Damrosch), center-periphery
classifications of literatures into "big" and "small" (Casanova) and
methods into "close" and "distant" (Moretti), and a heightened post-
colonial vigilance that demands deep knowledge of non-European
languages (Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak). But all of these remain tied
to familiar geographic perspectives: the study of markets, of minor lit-
eratures, of imperial hegemony. This special issue asks whether the
world-literary project could—and should—now push us to stake out
new starting points. What might be the limits of existing literary geog-
raphies? Azade Seyhan recommends David Porter's (2011: 253) notion
of a "trajectory," which understands each text as "a hybrid product of
multiple origins . . . always on its way to someplace else." Djelal Kadir
proposes a more traditional mode of textual reading as a starting point,
urging a close and critical attention to texts from different traditions as
an antidote to "an age of moribund and ravenous capital, whose preda-
tory drones and zombie minions view all cultures as opportune tar-
gets." Paulo de Medeiros argues against mapping the center-periphery
model onto major and minor literatures: if we understand Portuguese
or Irish literature as "minor," we miss the fact that these literatures are
European but not dominant. Medeiros invites us to think of Turkish
German and Eranco-Mauritian writers both as products of European
colonial violence and as a pluralizing resistance to any simple sense of
European centrality.
If this special issue raises new questions about where to begin the
study of world literature, it also asks where and how we might find its
end. What are the limits of a world-literary enterprise? How many texts
does it comprise? Which ones belong, and which can be discarded or
ignored? Starting with René Wellek and Austin Warren (1949: 41),
who dismissed world literature's pedagogical ambitions as so much
"sentimental cosmopolitanism," numerous critics have charged that
it is impossible to cram the whole world into undergraduate courses,
anthologies, or critical studies. But the impossibility of coverage and
completeness poses more questions than it answers, and this issue takes
146 MLQ • June 2013

up the theoretical opportunity afforded by these practical limits. Are

there specific texts or kinds of texts that exemplify world literature bet-
ter than others? Rebecca L. Walkowitz argues that certain digital works
might push us past our anxieties about the flattening power of market-
able, easily translatable world literature. Our fetishization of original
languages, Walkowitz contends, is itself a legacy of a European mod-
ernism, which placed its highest value on the specificity of linguistic
idioms. What if we began instead with a text that does not begin in
one idiom and undergo transformation to another but is, as she puts
it, "born-translated"? B. Venkat Mani too draws our attention away
from dominant models of circulation and translation: he emphasizes
processes of accumulating and collecting to underscore how access to
world literature is-socially but also historically conditioned. We have
tended to ignore libraries in our thinking about world literature. How
should one go about assembling the literatures of the world for public
and national libraries, digital collections, and private ownership? What
texts belong to the collections that organize world-literary research
projects, anthologies, and college classrooms?
Rather than bemoan the overwhelming vastness of world literature
and the threatening, enervating, homogenizing act of translation, this
special issue, perhaps surprisingly, pushes to expand the purview of
world literature even farther than conventional institutional norms of
teaching and research. While critics and literary scholars routinely dis-
cuss works emerging from a variety of linguistic and cultural contexts,
theyjust. as routinely neglect the multimedia context in which literature
takes shape. It turns out that literature has traveled not only through
translations into and out of different languages but through other
media. How many of us would know Friedrich Schiller's 1785 "An die
Freude" ("Ode to Joy") if not for Beethoven's Ninth Symphony? A call to
world harmony, it has been transported around the world not through
linguistic translations but through the addition and transformation of
a medium. Peter Höyng, who studies a performance of the Ninth Sym-
phony in Kinshasa, Congo, in 2010, argues for a new category, "world
music literature." Caroline Levine shows that late nineteenth-century
publishers and teachers of world literature sought to encourage mass
literacy as an essential element of modern democracy but that in the
Levine and IVIani • What Counts as World Literature? • 147

process they devalued the oral as backward and primitive, often erasing
the global pervasiveness and power of oral songs, stories, and poetry. It
is time, Levine declares, for a renewed attention to the vast life of ora-
ture as part of the institutions of world literature. Broadening this argu-
ment farther, Damrosch makes the case that classic literary works have
survived in part because of their adaptability to new media. Homer
endures through translation from orality to writing. Considering "the
ongoing life of the literary in today's expansive mediascape," Damrosch
offers video-game versions of Dante's Inferno and Murasaki's Tale ofGenji
as worthy exemplars of world literature in a "postliterary age."
These contributors foreground questions of accessibility and democ-
ratization. Who has the opportunity to encounter world literature, and
under what institutional conditions? World literature as a publishing
and teaching project was part of a push to democratize high culture
in the early twentieth century. This field then split into the advanced
research field of comparative literature, which demanded knowledge
of European literatures in their original languages, on the one hand,
and introductory undergraduate courses and series in world literature
in translation, on the other. Our own time has therefore witnessed a
strange institutional collision as theorists, attentive to globalization and
the aftermath of world empires, becanie interested in world literatures,
only to discover that they were operating alongside a fully functioning
but largely degraded pedagogical institution of world literature, com-
plete with anthologies, syllabi, and assignments. They happened upon
the publishing and pedagogical category of world literature that had
been active for over a century.
This special issue suggests that it is time to rethink and recapture
the power of this democratizing strand of world literature. Beyond
claims of theoretical territoriality, it is perhaps time to focus again on
Mahadevi Varma's concept of a kind of literary sharing that does not
co-opt the particularity of a literary tradition through its inclusion in
the world-literary corpus. It is perhaps time to rethink how in the com-
ing decades, as nationalism and other communitarian narcissisms con-
tinue to threaten the social fabric of tolerance and acceptance, access
to world literature might be a way out of what Susan Sontag calls "com-
pulsory provincialism." In a field divided into "high" and "low," schol-
148 MLQ • June 2 0 1 3

arly and pedagogical, European and postcolonial, world literature has

always laid claim to a genuine democratic potential, which it is up to us
to realize in the day-to-day work of literary institutions.

Caroline Levine is professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is

an editor of the newly revised Norton Anthology of World Literature (2012) and author
of two books: The Serious Pleasures of Suspense: Victorian Realism and Narrative
Doubt (2003) and Provol<ing Den)ocracy: Why We Need the Arts (2007). She co-
organizes the Andrew Mellon World Literature/s Research Workshop at the University
of Wisconsin- Madison and is completing a book tentatively called Strategic Formalism:
Shape, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network.

B. Venkat Mani is associate professor of German and global studies at the University
of Wisconsin-Madison. His publications include Cosmopolitical Claims: Turi<ish-
German Literatures from Nadotny to Pamuk (2007), a coedited special issue of
TRANSIT on cosmopolitical and transnational interventions in German studies (2011),
and several articles in German and English on world literature, cosmopolitanism,
postcolonialism, multilingualism, and transnationalism. He co-organizes the Andrew
Mellon World Literature/s Research Workshop at the University of Wisconsin-Madison
and was the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation senior research fellow at Leipziger
Buchwissenschaft, Universität Leipzig (2011-12). He is working on a book-length
project, tentatively titled Borrowing Privileges: Bibliomigrancy and the (Un)making of
World Literature in Germany (1800-2000), with a special focus on public and private
libraries..

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