INTRODUCTION:

GOETHE COINS A PHRASE

“ What is World Literature”
DAVID DAMROSCH, 2003

Group game:
Arrange the jumbled letters to form a word related to the
reading material Goethe coins a Phrase . The first group to guess
will choose any group to explain the concept based on the
reading material.
JANUARY, 1827 Age 77

 January 1827 , when Goethe first used the term

Weltliteratur with his statement “ National Literature
is now a rather unmeaning term; the epoch of world
literature is at hand, and everyone must strive to
hasten its approach
 Goethe was 77 years old when he used his newly
minted term Weltliteratur
crystallized

The significance of the term “ Weltliteratur”

The term crystallized both a
a. literary perspective and a new cultural
awareness
b. sense of an arising global modernity
Whose epoch as Goethe predicted, we now inhabit.
 World literature was long defined in North America
as an established canon of European
masterpieces, but emerging global perspective has
challenged both this European focus and very
category of “ masterpiece”,
 The term weltliterature “ world literature” emphasizes
the globalization
Johann Eckermann

 Goethe’s disciple. Who popularized the term

Weltliteratur, which passed the into common
currency after he published a book 1835. 3 years
after Goethe’s death.
The idea of world Literature : History and Pedagogical
Practice
John Pizer (2006) noted “ Goethe did not coin the
term Weltliteratur
Christoph Martin Wieland, who used it in undated
noted to his translation of Horace’s letters.
Because Wieland died fourteen years prior to
Goethe’s first mention of the term in 1827, he would
technically deserve credit for it.”
 August Ludwig Schlozer, whose “ Vorstellung der
Universaltheorie” uses the term in as early as 1772.
Diamond

 “casts a different color in every direction” (p1)

 David added that Eckman described “Goethe is
the living embodiment of world literature, even of
culture as a whole” (p.2 2nd para) “ deamonds to
tease and make sport with men, have placed
among them single figures so alluring that everyone
strives after them and so great that nobody reaches
them”. He even compared Goethe Raphael,
Moozart, Shakespeare, and Napoleons.
 Eckerman read his poems, with pleasure that no
words can describe.
 Eckerman admired Goethe so much.
Read the lines that expressed how much Eckerman
admired Goethe?
3rd line 2 para p. 2

How did Eckerman describe the writings of Goethe?

“ It needs no recommendation – it recommends itself”
P. 3 para 2 described ho Eckermann presented himself
to Goethe ( please read the lines)
What was Goethe’s reaction? Please read the lines.

“ A fairy tale is coming true”

On the other hand, David described Eckerman as

diamond in the rough: of humble origins, largely self-
taught, an inspiring poet and dramatisit, he seeks to
model his life and work on Geothe.
Network

WL – : less a set of work than a network

Geothe conceived literature as a network with
somewhat economic characteristics.
 Fritz Strich: this network… served to promoting a
traffic ideas between peoples, a literary market to
which the nations bring their intellectual treasure for
exchange (p.3)
 The emergence of the world market due to the
world literature had captured the imaginations of
Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx.
 Engels had gone to Manchester to study advance
methods of industrialization.
 Marx had gone to Berlin to immerse himself in
Philosophy.
 The two began to collaborate bringing together
Engel’s economic studies of industrialization and
Marx’s philosophical ideas in which they wrote The
Communist Manifesto ( 1848)
 Literature should not contain only in localities, it
should transcends national boundaries
 Intellectual creations of individual nations become
common property.
Quintessential literature

 Marx and Engels: Wl is the quintessential literature of modern time:

“ National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more
and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local
literatures there arises a world literature. (p4)
 What is the reaction of Claudio Guillen in the idea of world
literatue?
 Literature has only effective life as world literature
whenever, and wherever it is actively present within
a literary system beyond that of its original culture
 Meaning, it is understood, appreciated, discussed
in outside the boundaries.
 WL literature still consist of a huge corpus of works.
 Stem from widely disparate societeis, with every
different histories, frames of cultural reference, and
poetics.
These works are already the fusion of Interpretation,
histories, and cultures.
CIRCULATION,TRANSLATION,
PRODUCTION
DAMROSCH DEFINTION OF LITERATURE
 . “ World literature is an elliptical refraction of national literature”,
Hamilton, 2014 – Ellipsis of World Literature
“ metaphor – travel”
national – as relating to a work’s original cultural
neighborhood before it goes in to circulate in the world at large”.
“ yet these traces are increasingly diffused and become ever
more sharply refracted as a work travels farther from home”

 (p 6)
How did Damrsoch describe
literature?

 WL is not an infinite ungraspable canon of works but

rather a mode of circulation and of reading,
applicable to individual works as to bodies of
material, available for reading established classics
and new discoveries alike.
 To Damrosch, world literature is not all the literature
of the world, but only that literature which crosses
border.
Variability of Literature

 Strengths-when the work is well presented and read

well
 Vulnerability- it is mishandled or misappropriated by
its newfound foreign friends.
 Double process

 1. by being read as literature

 2. by circulating out into a broader world beyond its linguistic
and cultural point of origin
 World literature “all literary works that circulate beyond their
culture of origin, either in translation or in their original
language.”
 World literature happens when:
 Russian novels remake English literature
 Turkish writer takes inspiration from a Colombian writer
 Japanese critics review translations of Lebanese poetry.
 Damrosch maintains that a literary work never really
leaves its place of origin but simply has two foci
In the host country – and the source country .
The flow of transformation is constantly moving and
transporting ideas and concepts in two different
culture.
 . WL is writing gains in translation” He explains that
several different types of literature can either
maintain or lose meaning when they become a
translated world
EPIC OF GILGAMESH

He set this epic of Gilgamesh as an example of literary

work that has been opened to a wider audience
through its growth in translation
Because of this interconnection, Damrosch
believes that translations are constantly being
influence by different outside forces.
 Authenticity and
transformation
 As it moves into the sphere of world literature, far
from inevitably suffering a loss of authenticity or
essence, a work can gain in many ways.
 A literary work manifest differently abroad than it
does at home
Goethe gains in the translations:
- collaborated on opera liberetti. Made translations
form French , read widely
For example: treaties and informational texts are
maintained in literal translation because the language
they use is simple and concise. They neither gain nor
lose when translated.
Meanwhile, other literary works such as poems are
difficult to translate because they are so tied to their
original language that they can lose meaning in their
translation and read poorly in the other language.
MIRRORING

 Goethe and his translations

 I do not like to read my Faust any more in German.
He remarks at one point, but in a new French
translation he finds his masterwork “again fresh,
new, and spirited”—even though the translation is
mostly in prose. • “mirroring”: finding the foreign
perspective sharper and clearer than German
criticism can be. (p7)
 His works reflected back to him ( describing Goethe’s
words, style and experience as a writer)
 Geothe finds commentaries about his works in
English and French more vibrant, sharpers, and
clearer than German criticism.
 He find his first published book as individual pride
than a national pride., because of mirroring. It
reflected back to his personality as a writer other
than the work as German writer.
Torquato Tasso

This is one of the plays of Goethe adapted by

Alexander Duval titled “ Le Tasse: Drame histoorique
en cinq actes”.
-he quotes at length from the two reviews
a. Duval’s dependence on Goethe’s play “ felicitous
borrowings” – (Plagiarism)
b. Duval as a pale imitation of Goethe; as
improvement of Goethe’s
Appreciation of Germans
works

 Borrowing without thanks

 Making use without acknowledgement
Goethe wanted to stimulate his countrymen to follow
the international circulation of works. He encouraged
his readers by appealing to their –and his own- national
pride; “ there is being formed universal world literature”
(p 7)
PROVINCIAL CHARACTER

 German literature and its provincial character • It is

far from certain that the provincial work will manage
to meet French and English standards. Lacking a
strong literary tradition at home, how can a German
writer ever live up to the great models of wealthier
traditions?
 For all his pride in his own achievements and those
of friends, like Schiller, Goethe has an uneasy sense
that German culture is provincial, lacking a great
history, lacking political unity. He can’t afford to
grant “national literature” too much meaning, since
he doesn’t even live in a proper nation at all.
 The writer from a marginal culture is in a double
bind. With littler to go on at home, a young writer
can only achieve greatness by emulating desirable
foreign models—”the need for an intercourse with
great predecessors it’s a sure sign of a higher
talent.” 9 • “Study Moliere, study Shakespeare”— (
p.9)
 The provincial writer
 cut off but also free from the bonds of an inherited
tradition, and in principle can engage all the more
fully, and by mature choice, with a broader literary
world:
 . a given writer or reader is likely both to inherit and
to seek out a variety of networks of transmission and
reception, engaging differently with works from
each world.
Serbian Poem & Chinese Novel

These are the literary works that influenced Goethe in

conceptualizing/ formulating the term Weltliterature.
(read p. 10-13
He sees the Chinese Novel a version of his own ideal.
Elitism

 This is the preferred type of world literature Goethe

wanted to produced ( p.13 last para)
 Goethe is uncomfortably aware that there is a form
of world literature floodings over : all countries and
regions” that does not include his works or similarly
elite production
Please read p 14 & 15)
Classics,Masterpieces,
Windows

 Three ways on how literature is seen:

 Established body of classics,
 Evolving canon of masterpieces
 Multiple windows on the world
 Please read p. 15- 16b
Presentism

 Erases the past as a serious factor, leaving the best

a few nostalgic postmodern references, the
historical equivalent of the “ local color”.
 This could be the possible effect of modernization,
we reproduce the least appealing characteristics
A new literary development

 • For the first time in history, authors of highly

successful works can hope to have them translated
into 20 or 30 languages within a few years of
publication, and foreign countries may even
provide the primary readership for writers who have
small audiences at home or who are censored by
their governments.
BIE DAO

 How to read Bei Dao? • Far from being a rootless

cosmopolitan, Bei Dao is doubly or multiply linked to
events and audiences at home and abroad. •
 To read his poems in English we should be alive to
relevant aspects of the context of their production,
but we don’t finally need the Chinese context in all
its particularity. When all is said and done, Bei Dao in
English isn’t Bei Dao in Chinese. (p.22)
 Works of world literature take on a new life as they
move into the world at large, and to understand this
new life we need to look closely at the ways the
work becomes reframed in its translations and in its
new cultural contexts. 24 •
 Translation is always involved (the space of
transculturation as a liminal zone or impassioned
margin where diver cultures converge without
merging” 24
INDIAN LITERATURE

 Different Indian literatures are always strongly

colored by the other languages in use around them.
As a result, Dev says, no Indian literature is ever itself
alone: “ Bengali will be Bengali+ Panjabi Panjabi +,
and tamil tamil +.
 In a multilingual situation there cannot be a true
appreciation of a single literature in absolute
isolation. P 27
 For any given observer, even a genuinely global
perspective remains a perspective from
somewhere, and global patterns of the circulation
of world literature take shape in their local
manifestations. 27
 Group Output for Odysseus

Make an infographics on the adventure of Odysseus with the

following information:

1. When and where it happened.

2. How it happened
3. What happened? ( Description of the adventure)