<Book Review> Thomas Oliver Beebee, ed. German Literature as World Literature. London: Bloomsbury Press, 2014, 214 pp.

Svend Erik Larsen 한국영어영문학회 2015 영어 영문학 Vol.61 No.1

Beyond the Global Village

( Svend Erik Larsen ) 한국영어영문학회 2015 영어 영문학 Vol.61 No.3

Faced with an unknown future, cultural historians, scientists in general and politicians as well rely on basic aesthetic strategies: narratives and metaphors. Narratives locate the unknown in a scenario of interacting humans in time an spaces; in other words, they use the parameters of the known human life world to make the unknown knowable; metaphors relate the unknown, large and small, to known situations and phenomena and direct our attention to a recognizable world. However, such strategies can be both misleading and backward looking in spite of all good intentions of creating an understanding with the opposite effect. One strategy caught in this predicament is Marshall McLuhan’s early coinage in The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) of the metaphor of the global village to suggest a narrative to grasp the unknown future of the digital and networked society. The article analyses the metaphor, both with regard to its understanding of the known world it refers to and with regard to the networked future it envisions. Based on the analysis of two autobiographies from the 17th and 18th century, from Iceland and Tasmania, the article unfolds the subjective approach to multidimensional colonial networks in transition as a more relevant historical complexity to come to grips with a globalized future than the image of the village.

World Literature in an Extended Media Landscape

Svend Erik Larsen 한국영어영문학회 2017 영어 영문학 Vol.63 No.4

Literature consists of works of language, but it has never been able to function as literature without being part of an extended media landscape. From time immemorial, oratures require performances to work and thus cannot exist without use of bodily signs or use of various tools and instruments. Today, of course, this extended media landscape is vaster and more complex and distributed through more differentiated and numerous agencies than ever before, which also changes the mutual relation between the media involved in the production, dissemination and use of literature as well as the changing position of literature in the media landscape. The aim of the paper is to contribute to an understanding of the dynamics of the media landscape with literature at its center, rather than making an account of the separate media involved.

Local Literature in a World Literature Perspective

( Svend Erik Larsen ) 한국영어영문학회 2015 영어 영문학 Vol.61 No.1

Behind the enticing title of German Literature as World Literature the reader may ask what to expect: a new type of literary history of German literature? A recapitulation of the history of the notion of world literature as it emerged in Germany between Christoph Wieland and Goethe? A model for presenting local or national literatures in a world literature perspective with German literature as an example? A set of selective readings of individual texts or writers? Well, we do not get a broad historical account.after all what can you do on 214 pages?.and we do not get a new presentation of the history of the concept of world literature, although it is referred to. We get some attempts to set up principles for presenting concrete local literatures in a world literature perspective, and we get detailed readings of a number of works and writers from modern German literature.here defined as literature after 1800.with a transnational perspective. The informative introduction by the editor Thomas Beebee discusses the principles for how to establish a world literature perspective, in particular, with regard to local literatures, and also presents five different possible approaches, a selection of what is used globally in the debate on world literature and literary history today. He also makes an argument for why German literature can be placed in this context and how the literary history of that literature will benefit from adapting the world literature perspective. The introduction and the nine individual chapters all subscribe to the same basic assumption, namely that all national literatures define themselves “over, against, and through their others” (4) and that one will always find “international, cross-cultural factors at work” (p. 8). Probably, this general idea will be accepted by all writers of literary his-tories today, whether they cover contemporary or past history. But Beebee also adds a temporal dimension: The focus is modern German literature, that is to say from Goethe and onwards. It would be difficult to avoid mentioning Goethe’s reflections on world literature to his conversations with Eckermann in 1827 (although he was not the first to use the term) and equally difficult to forget the reference to world literature (and the world market) in the Communist Manifesto from 1848. These references are not omitted here either. Thus, to begin with Goethe in the German case seems almost natural, that is the point when a new selfreflection of what German means and what world literature means emerges in one gesture, also with implications outside the German cultural space. Here, a “systematic” (2) preoccupation with this problem takes off. Apart from the brief overview of world literature initiatives over the last 20-30 years, David Damrosch not least, Beebee discusses five ways of looking at world literature, first of all concerned with what it takes for a text to be characterized as world literature. World literature may be seen as all literatures in the world, and thus nothing is excluded; it be taken to be based on a universal human capacity; it may mean inclusion in a transnational hypercanon, or participation in a global dissemination process, or.finally.that the text is written for a global readership. If we do not take into account that the very notions of ‘literature’ and also of ‘world’ have changed over time and space, then what is central to the five approaches is that they all focus on the status of the text itself.is it a case of world literature or not? But what Damrosch and others also have pointed to, and maybe more importantly, is that the main concern of world literature studies is to establish ways of a focused reading of any text or corpus of texts to place them in a world literature perspective. From this perspective, world literature is not about typologies or taxonomies of texts, but about reading methods and their theoretical underpinning. This approach is not on Beebee’s list, but is mentioned now and then in the introduction. However, it is the main drive behind the nine chapters on individual texts, writers and cases. They are all highly interesting and in many case innovative and inspiring for future work. But they almost never discuss the principles and concepts laid out in the introduction which reduces the potential of the volume to be a much needed model for how to see local literatures in a world literature perspective. Some of the chapters actually make their own discussion on their take on world literature. Here, a closer dialogue between the chapters themselves and in relation to the introduction would have made the book more valuable. Also, a discussion of the representativity of the chosen cases would have helped to see the volume as the result of a new concerted effort. If we leave this criticism behind and look at what we get in the chapters, we are well treated indeed. The chapters I find the most enriching are the first and the last and one in the middle of the book. The first one is a comparative reading of Goethe’s Elective Affinities with Hong Lou Meng’s The Story of Stone. The point is to establish a comparative reading which is not caught up in traditional notions of influence, but instead focuses on cultural parallels and differences that allows for a cross-cultural dialogue. The last chapter on hybrid literatures, mainly with regard to linguistic hybridity and not with regard to other media, deals instructively with literatures of migration and colonialism/postcolonialism in a German context. My third favourite chapter is the account of Alexander von Humboldt and Latin-America, integrating most of the aspects relevant for a world literature reading: history, the transnational material, the dialectical reciprocity between Germany, Europe and Latin-America combined with an astute use of the text material. Two chapters deal with more institutionalized aspects, one on the circulation of Chinese novels in the 18th and early 19th century, the other on German literature and the Nobel Prize. Here, the two cases in point are, surprisingly and very interestingly, two writers who are now completely forgotten by the readership outside the circles of specialists, Rudolf Eucken and Paul Heyse. Both chapter are reminders of the fundamentally historical and hence of regional dimension of criteria for the world literature status of texts and of the trajectories of translations and dissemination in general. The remaining chapters deal with individual cases of writers and texts and are more traditional in their approach, but rich in material and textual detail: Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Rainer Marie Rilke, Bertolt Brecht, W.G. Sebald. The volume seems to be the first in a series of selective and focused presentations of national/local literatures in a world literature perspective. The beginning is promising, but also with potential for improvements in the future volumes.