ENGE 2640

Introduction to World Literatures in English

Week 2
Context. What is / what are world literatures in English?

INTRODUCTION
So, we mentioned this briefly last week – what exactly is this thing called “world literatures in
English” that we will be studying over the next 12 weeks or so? It is trying to find a suitable
answer to this question that I want us to think about today. In so doing, we will learn about
the importance of context to the study of literature (and also why this awkward title of the
lecture is perhaps the best one that anyone can give!). This then will be a valuable lesson that
you will be able to bring to discussions in all of your other literature courses.

WORLD LITERATURE?
The first thing I think we have to do is distinguish between “World Literatures in English” and
“World Literature.” At the end of the term, I don’t want you going away thinking that you
have completed a course in “world literature” – because to all intents and purposes, you
haven’t. At best, what I think you can say is that you’ve completed a course that talks to a
very particular sub-species of world literature. Let’s find out why.

World literature was born as a concept in or around 1827, when the German thinker Johann
Wolfgang von Goethe started writing (to his friends) about “weltliteratur.” He had been
reading literary work from around the world and had concluded that “poetry is the universal
possession of mankind, revealing itself everywhere and at all times in hundreds and hundreds
of men.” From this sense of things, Goethe asserted that “National literature is now a rather
unmeaning term; the epoch of world literature is at hand” (cited in Damrosch 2003, 1). Let’s
think about this a little. Goethe is saying here that poetry (but let’s expand “poetry” to mean
all literature, because that’s what the term poetry described in the early-nineteenth century)
is a common feature to human cultures. As such, it does not belong to a specific nation (or
national consciousness). Put another way, literature is a particular terrain of human

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expression that transcends (or, goes beyond) the artificial borders that Man imposes on the
land (such as the borders which define one country from another).

It’s a beautiful way of thinking about things, but do you agree with it? What do you think of
Goethe’s sense of literature? Do you think he is correct, or do you think that some literatures
do belong to particular nations?

How one answers these kinds of question will ultimately decide how you think about world
literature as a concept. If we agree with Goethe, then our sense of world literature will be of
a literature that exists somehow beyond the worldly concerns of Men. That is to say, world
literature would describe a transcendent body of human expression that inhabited
something like an Ideal plane above such “petty” things as nation-states.

But, if we disagree with Goethe then “world literature” must be thought of as simply the
world’s national literatures brought together under one umbrella term. Here, world literature
is understood as the total literary output of all the world’s nations.

For the last twenty or thirty years, literary scholars have been trying to answer this question
(so you shouldn’t be too upset if you can’t decide one way or another, either!). And they’ve
tried to do so in various ways, some of which are:

 by looking at the literary history (and therefore inheritances) of today’s literatures from
around the world
 by trying to arrive at a binding definition of “national literature”
 by trying to answer the question, “what is literature?”

But still, there is no single understanding of what is meant by the term world literature. What
we can say of it, then, is always provisional and tentative (in the sense that it could change at
any moment). But nonetheless we have to give it a go in order to distinguish it from our
object of study – world literatures in English.

So, how about this? World literature is:

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  that literature which is written by authors from all the different countries in the
world
 written in any language
 “about” anything

Yes, this is a terrible definition of world literature, and for many different reasons!! This is a
terrible definition not least because of the presumptions it makes about literature being a
written form (for example African literary history is largely oral in nature), and that it is so
encompassing as a definition that it is entirely useless as a marker of difference of any sort
(doesn’t this just describe “literature”?)!

Nonetheless, I want to zero in on the second feature that I give here, because this is to where
we can trace the divergence of our study area. “World literatures in English” is clearly an
attempt to be done with all those literatures that are not written in English. That is to say, on
this course we are not interested in literatures written in German or French or even
literatures written in Chinese. Where we make a stand in this expansive arena of world
literature is in the language of literary production – that is, the language of the literature that
we will read.

However, it is precisely because we intervene in the discussion of world literature – to say

that we are only interested in fiction that is written in English – that means we are not
studying “world literature” proper. At best, we are studying a very particular sub-species of it.

CONTEXT
Why then is this course not simply labelled “An introduction to English Literature”? Well,
because we want to emphasize the fact that English literature is not just written by English
people. That is to say, we want to emphasize the fact that English literature is a global
phenomenon; it gets written around the world by very different people indeed.

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Let’s think a little bit about those countries. Certainly, literature written in English is largely
produced in countries that have English as an official language. But how many of these
countries can you name?

Just from the texts that I want us to read on this course we can offer Singapore, Hong Kong,
South Africa, Trinidad, India, USA, and Australia as a response to the above question (there
are of course many more). But what do you notice about these very different countries? Yes,
they were all part of the British Empire at one time or another. It is the British Empire, then,
that gives us the context to our literary texts. That is to say, we are reading these texts today
as examples of literatures written in English precisely because of the manoeuvres of the
British Empire.

What do we know about the British Empire?

 It can be traced back as far as 1497 – John Cabot and the Cod grounds of Newfoundland,
Canada
 At its height it accounted for one quarter of the world’s total land mass
 Similarly, at one point, one quarter of the world’s population were subject to the British
Crown

This military expansionism is perhaps the single most important reason why we are learning
about this literature in this Special Administrative Region! And because of this shared history,
there is a particular concern with power relations that runs through all of the texts that we
will study. Even if these relationships are not discussed explicitly, you will be able to see them
working away beneath the main concern of the narrative.

SIGNIFICANCE OF CONTEXT
Why is this note on the historical context of the literature that we will be reading an
important one to make? Well, first because every piece of literature comes from a particular
context. That is to say, no literature ever suddenly just exists; it is always the product of
sociological or political concerns or literary predecessors. And second, because literature is
nothing without context. Let me explain:

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You’ll remember that one of the questions that the world literature theorists have been
trying to answer is, “what is literature?” The problem that they have encountered is that
literature doesn’t actually exist! That is to say, there is nothing essential to a text that makes
it “literature.” Rather, whether or not we call a text a work of literature seems entirely
dependent on whether we want to treat that text as literary or not. Put simply, literature is
just a matter of how we treat a text. Let me give you an analogy that might make the point a
little clearer.

When a gardener wishes to remove all the weeds from her garden, she does so by removing
all the plants that she does not want in her garden. She does this because there is no such
thing as a “weed”. Rather a weed is just a plant that a particular gardener does not want in
her garden. In other words, if a gardener didn’t want a rose bush in her garden, she would
simply treat it as a weed and pull it from the ground.

In just the same way that the quality of “weediness” doesn’t exist, neither does the quality of
“literariness.” What we conclude from this then is that literature is a product of our
treatment of texts and nothing more. It is perhaps an unsatisfying conclusion to make about
the state of literature, but I think it is an unavoidable one. Very famous artists have drawn
exactly the same conclusions about art when they have tried to answer the question, “what is
art?” They too found that anything can be considered “art” as long as it is exhibited in, say, an
art gallery or art museum. There are two infamous sculptures that make the point quite
forcefully. The first is by the celebrated French artist Marcel Duchamp, and is called Fountain
(1917), and the second is by American Carl Andre, titled Equivalent VIII (1966). Although
there is fifty years between them, both sculptors get us to consider the significance of
context to artistic expression. Since it was the first of its kind, let’s focus on Duchamp’s
Fountain.

Of course, this is simply a man’s urinal. But – and this, I think, is true – it takes on a different
quality when it is exhibited as a piece of art in an art gallery. Suddenly, in this new context,
this little-considered object of the everyday becomes an object of contemplation. And we are
forced to consider what Duchamp is trying to say – possibly:

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  Everyday objects are artistic
 Art begins with a physical release (literally)
 Anything can be art

It’s important to realize that at the very moment we are driven to consider such ideas, the
everyday object of the urinal has been turned into an object of contemplation. By being
placed in a building that encourages us to critique the meaning of objects, this urinal finds a
new life as an artistic object. The point to take away here, then, is that it is the context of our
object of enquiry that determines how we consider it.

The same is true for literature. And with this the deeper significance of the term “world
literatures in English” is revealed. We are not just concerned with literatures that have been
written in English from various places around the world, we are concerned with how to read
these particular literatures (how to treat them). And because of this, we have to pay special
attention to some of the major ways in which this literature is contextualized, namely:

 historically (through the British Empire)

 through the national cultures of the texts under discussion
 and through our own national cultures (as readers)

OUR THREE QUESTIONS

It is, then, this set of contexts that give us the three questions that we will routinely ask of
each of the texts that we will be studying on this course:

1. What is the relationship of this text to British colonialism?

2. In what ways is this text responsive to a national culture?
3. What does it mean to read this text in Hong Kong?

Clearly, there will be no simple answers to these questions, but in trying to respond to them
we will get a good springboard into thinking about not only how we read the texts on this
course, but all the literature on all those courses to come.

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CONCLUSION
Let me offer a brief conclusion, then. What all of this is geared towards is loosening your
ideas of both what English literature is and what you can say about it. Let me stress again, if
we learn one thing at all it should be that English literature does not belong to the English or
England. Rather, English literature (literatures in English) is a world of writing that belongs to
those who write and read it. In other words, English literature belongs to you!

Now, because English literature belongs to you, that means that you can read it and critique
it in precisely the way that you see fit. The literature is yours and so you can do with it what
you want. Therefore, what a Hong Kong student makes of Shakespeare is just as important as
what an English student makes of Shakespeare. The readings may be different, but neither is
better solely because of the location of the student. What do you think of Shakespeare? If I
ask the question it is because I want you to have some sense that you are the rightful owner
of the literature under discussion and that your response is a valuable one to offer.

What then is/are world literatures in English? Well, world literatures in English are works of
fiction from around the world that have been written in English. But, world literatures in
English is (also) a context by which we can read and understand various literatures written in
English…

FOR NEXT WEEK

Please read Xu Xi’s short story “Blackjack,” which is reprinted for you in the course reader.

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WORKS CITED
Damrosch, David. (2003), What is World Literature? Princeton: Princeton University Press.

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