World literature without a hyphen

New Left Review

Volumn , Issue 54, 2008, Pages 87-100

  Beecroft, Alexander ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 57549116161     PISSN: 00286060     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Review

References (29)

1. For an enlightening discussion of Goethe and Weltliteratur, see David Damrosch, What is World Literature?, Princeton 2003, pp. 1-36.
2. Immanuel Wallerstein, World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction, Durham, NC 2004, pp. 15-6 and 98-9.
3. Pascale Casanova, La République mondiale des lettres, Paris 1999, pp. 24, 62-3.
4. Franco Moretti, 'Conjectures on World Literature', NLR I, January-February 2000, reprinted in Christopher Prendergast, ed., Debating World Literature, London 2004. Moretti and Prendergast have continued a lively exchange on the subject: see NLR 8, 20, 24, 26, 28, 34 and 41.
5. Jonathan Zwicker uses a methodology owing much to Moretti (including numerical analyses of the numbers of books published per year in different forms, and the numbers held in particular library collections), as well as close readings, to show inter alia that pre-Meiji literature-that is, prior to Western influence-continued to have a major impact on Japanese readers and writers into the twentieth century. Zwicker, Practices of the Sentimental Imagination: Melodrama, the Novel and the Social Imaginary in Nineteenth-Century Japan, Cambridge, MA 2006.
6. The five volumes of Il romanzo edited by Moretti between 2001-03 provide an indispensable foundation for further and ever more nuanced work on these problems.
7. See Janet Abu-Lughod for what she characterizes as a 'thirteenth-century world system' in Before European Hegemony. The World System AD 1250-1350, Oxford 1989.
8. Andre Gunder Frank and Barry Gills both attempt to stretch the beginnings of a world-system to much earlier times: Frank and Gills, The World System: Five Hundred Years or Five Thousand?, London 1993;
9. Frank, ReORIENT: Global Economy in the Asian Age, Berkeley 1998.
10. 'More Conjectures', NLR 20, March-April 2003, pp. 73-4.
11. Moretti's model of 'distant reading', which involves the reading of scholarship about the novel rather than novels themselves, seems another version of the axial division of labour specialists in national literatures do the resource-extracting work of reading vast numbers of texts, while generalists add surplus value to this work through their theoretical syntheses.
12. I am inspired to make this turn away from economic metaphors towards ecology by Niklas Luhmann's discussion of 'environment' as that which lies outside a particular social subsystem. The notion of literature as such a subsystem, recognizing distinctions within its environment but only selectively interconnected with it, is a useful refining of the discussions of literary and economic systems found, for example, in Casanova. Luhmann, Ecological Communication, Chicago 1989, pp. 15-21.
13. I find, in other words, that scholars on Greek and Sanskrit provide not merely the raw data which theories of literature can attempt to explain, but the very theoretical structures which those theories seek to develop.
14. Gregory Nagy notes that Archaic Greek lyric is in fact usually in a dynamic tension between the epichoric and what I call the panchoric. Pindar's Homer. The Lyric Possession of an Epic Past, Baltimore 1990, pp. 66-7.
15. Milman Parry, The Making of Homeric Verse, Oxford 1971;
16. Albert Bates Lord, The Singer of Tales, Cambridge, MA 1960. The appeal to the oral histories of the Gitxsan and Wet'suwet'en nations in the establishment of aboriginal land title in Delgamuukw v. British Columbia offers a contemporary example of the use of epichoric literary tradition to define communities and their territories.
17. Richard Daly, Our Box Was Full: An Ethnography for the Delgamuukw Plaintiffs, Vancouver 2005, provides an excellent introduction to these issues by an anthropologist involved in the case.
18. Although the reverse can also be true. On the use of Stesichorus's Palinode - an epichoric rejection of the Panhellenic myth of the abduction of Helen to Troy - by Plato in the Phaedrus as a means of situating Socrates's own work in opposition to rhetoric (which Plato has Socrates align with epic and the Panhellenic),
19. see Alexander Beecroft, '"This is not a true story": Stesichorus's Palinode and the Revenge of the Epichoric', Transactions of the American Philological Association, vol. 136 (2006), pp. 47-69.
20. Basic bibliography here would include: Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins, eds, Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling beyond the Nation, Minneapolis 1998;
21. Carol Breckenridge et al, Cosmopolitanism, Durham, NC 2002;
22. Gillian Brock and Harry Brighouse, eds, The Political Philosophy of Cosmopolitanism, Cambridge 2005,
23. and Kwame Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers, New York 2006.
24. Sheldon Pollock, 'The Sanskrit Cosmopolis, 300-1300: Transculturation, Vernacularization and the Question of Ideology', in Jan Houben, ed., Ideology and Status of Sanskrit: Contributions to the History of the Sanskrit Language, Leiden 1996, p. 219.
25. Sheldon Pollock, 'Cosmopolitan and Vernacular in History', in Breckenridge et al, Cosmopolitanism. As Pollock himself points out, Tamil occupies a somewhat problematic position within this schema: 'The Cosmopolitan Vernacular', Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 57, no. 1 (1998), p. 20, note 14. If the (disputed) traditional dating of early Sangam literature to the first few centuries CE is accepted, then Tamil becomes a quite disruptive vernacular intrusion on the cosmopolitan millennium. The point need not be to embrace Pollock's model dogmatically, something that the nature of this article would in any event hardly permit. Rather, the value in this exercise lies in identifying a typological similarity, which can inform the study of a variety of literary contexts.
26. In effect Casanova takes the vernacular moment as the birth of her narrative. Prendergast finds in it phases analogous to the vernacular, national and global, although I would prefer to stress their status as a synchronic system of systems rather than as an evolutionary process.
27. Strikingly, both texts, recovered respectively in the early 19th and 20th centuries have been deployed as the autochthonous origins of multiple literatures: English and (erroneously) Danish for Beowulf, Bengali, Assamese and Oriya for the Charyapada.
28. Jean Rouaud and Michel Le Bris, eds, Pour une littérature- monde, Paris 2007.
29. A productive example is the collection of essays edited by Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih, which explores in part the connections between the two editors' respective Francophone and Sinophone interests: Minor Transnationalisms, Durham, NC 2005.