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| ISBN-13: | 9780822374534 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 12/17/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 408 |
| File size: | 858 KB |
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What Is a World?
On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature
By Pheng Cheah
Duke University Press
Copyright © 2016 Duke University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-7453-4
CHAPTER 1
The New World Literature
Literary Studies Discovers Globalization
The intensification of globalization in the past two decades has led to debates within literary studies about reinventing the discipline of comparative literature and the subfield of world literature in a manner that is ethically sensitive to the cultural differences and geopolitical complexities of the contemporary age. As illustrated by the volume published in response to the 1993 Bernheimer Report to the American Comparative Literature Association, Comparative Literature in the Age of Multiculturalism (1995), and its successor volume, Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalization (2006), and other discussions in their wake, the debate within comparative literature has focused on wrenching the comparative enterprise away from its Eurocentric home in the trans-Atlantic fraternity of English, German, and French national literatures. It has been suggested that the history of colonialism and contemporary globalization has brought many different cultures into jarring proximity so that the comparative enterprise has become necessary and also more anxiety-ridden. For example, one must examine the global production of Western cultures and literatures, particularly from the perspectives of empire and postcoloniality, and include the literatures of formerly colonized regions written in European languages. The comparative enterprise should also take into account postcolonial literatures or orature in non-European vernacular languages in a study of transcolonialism. It has also been argued that contemporary globalization has created a genuinely transcultural zone that undermines the territorial borders of cultural and literary production, thereby leading to the emergence of a global consciousness. Accordingly, the units of comparison can no longer be merely national. One must also consider how the local both enters into and is traversed by the global.
The comparative study of literature is generally distinguished from the study of world literature on the grounds that the former requires deep knowledge of various languages whereas world literature is merely literature in translation and is usually studied only in English. Such a distinction, however, overlooks the close connections between the two forms of literary study. In the first place, world literature presupposes a prior comparative moment since the availability of something in translation requires a comparative judgment of the value of the original so that it can be translated. Second, comparative literature also presupposes translation in a very pragmatic sense. Since comparative studies of literature are written in one language, they generally involve the translation of quotations from the studied literatures into the language of the scholarly text so that the study is intelligible to a readership who may not possess all the languages the comparatist has. In this regard, comparative literary studies are also part of the enterprise of world literature, which in addition to translating foreign literatures, includes their study and criticism. But third and most important, the internal link between comparative literature and world literature is seen in the fact that comparative activity and the injunction to rethink comparative literature has become more urgent precisely because the multiplication of global connections integrates all of us into a shared world. Comparative activity makes no sense unless we are part of a common world. The world is therefore both the substrate and the end of comparison. Hence, an exploration of what constitutes a world should be prolegomenal to rethinking the agenda of both comparative and world literature.
What exactly is "the world" in recent attempts to rethink world literature in the North Atlantic academy? The primary way of asserting literature's worldliness today is to treat it as an object of circulation in a global market of print commodities or as the product of a global system of production either literally or by analogy. There is the obligatory nod to Goethe's historical lead in his use of the market analogy in his brief comments on Weltliteratur, but one mainly senses the shadow of Marx, particularly in the incorporation of the vocabulary of center and periphery from world-systems theory to describe literary phenomena.
When one compares the recent revival of world literature to earlier attempts to selectively appropriate and transform Goethe's idea of Weltliteratur in the post–World War II era, such as Erich Auerbach's exemplary essay "Philology and Weltliteratur" (1952), what is especially striking is the hollowing out of the humanist ethos that had been world literature's traditional heart and core. Auerbach emphasized that Weltliteratur was governed by two principles. First, it presupposed the idea of humanity as its rational kernel. Humanity, however, was not something naturally given but a telos to be achieved through intercourse across the existential plurality and diversity of human traditions and cultures whose individuality must be maintained and whose unique historical development must be respected. "Weltliteratur does not merely refer to what is generically common and human; rather it considers humanity to be the product of the cross-fertilization of the manifold [als wechselseitige Befruchtung des Mannigfaltigen]. The presupposition of Weltliteratur is a felix culpa: mankind's division into many cultures." World literary intercourse enables the fabrication of humanity because the philological study of the unique development of specific linguistic traditions as manifested in the world's different literary cultures can help us compose a universal history of the human spirit that underlies these literatures.
Second, Weltliteratur has an irreducible temporal dimension. According to Auerbach, Goethe related Weltliteratur to "the past and to the future," to world history. The humanism of Weltliteratur is "historicist," Auerbach stressed. Its concern "was not only the overt discovery of materials and the development of methods of research, but beyond that their penetration and evaluation so that an inner history of mankind — which thereby created a conception of man unified in his multiplicity [in ihrer Vielfalt einheitlichen Vorstellung vom Menschen] — could be written." The universal history of the human spirit facilitates the making of humanity by serving as a specular structure, a mirror in which all human individuals can recognize, become conscious of, and contemplate their humanity and its potential because it gives them a spectacular vision of the achievements of the human species organized into a narrative of universal progress. Hence,
within worldly actuality [Weltwirklichkeit], history affects us most immediately, stirs us most deeply and compels us most forcibly to a consciousness of ourselves. It is the only object in which human beings can step before us in their wholeness. Under the object of history one is to understand not only the past, but the progression of events in general; history therefore includes the present. The inner history of the last thousand years is the history of mankind achieving self-expression: this is what philology, a historicist discipline, treats. This history contains the records of man's mighty, adventurous advance to a consciousness of his human condition and to the actualization of his given potential [Möglichkeiten]; and this advance, whose final goal ... was barely imaginable for a long time, still seems to have proceeded as if according to a plan, in spite of its twisted course. All the rich tensions of which our being is capable are contained within this course. A drama [Schauspiel] unfolds whose scope and depth sets in motion all the spectator's powers [Kräfte], enabling him at the same time to find peace in his given potential by the enrichment he gains from having witnessed the drama.
In Auerbach's view, the temporal dimension of world literature and its connection to world history gives it a normative force. To use an Aristotelian but also a Kantian word, this force is a type of causality, a form of action that actualizes or brings something into actuality. This causality is not efficient in character. The history in question is "an inner history," and it stimulates and forms consciousness and the spiritual dimension of human existence. It compels us to see our humanity, and what it shows us moves us to action because it allows us to see that we can actualize our potentialities. This normative force is the vocation of world literature. Only the study of literary traditions governed by it deserves to be called Weltliteratur.
If we compare Auerbach's account of world literature to the more prominent theories of world literature today, the causality of literature that is at stake in the contemporary reinvention of world literature is necessarily a much weaker force. In these new theories, the world has been almost completely emptied of its normative vocation. World literature has lost its temporal dimension by being sundered from what is regarded as an effete idealist humanist philosophy of world history. As I will show, the defining characteristic of the world in recent accounts of world literature is spatial extension. It refers to the extensive scope and scale of the production, circulation, consumption, and evaluation of literature. Simply put, "world" is extension on a global scale, where world literature is conceived through an analogy with a world market's global reach. What is worldly about literature is its locomotion or movement in Mercatorian space according to the mathematical coordinates of Euclidean geometry. Where literary history is broached, time is viewed in similarly spatial terms. Accordingly, as a form of intercourse, world literature is now restricted to a purely spatial dimension. It is the exchange or circulation of an object between subjects, the object's movement across flat spatial distance in time conceived spatially. It no longer opens up the temporal horizon that Auerbach calls "the inner history of mankind."
Consequently, the normative content remaining in the concept of the world is minimal. It consists of the erosion of the limitations imposed by national boundaries on the production, circulation, reception, and evaluation of literature as a result of globalization. Auerbach had also written of the "decaying" of "the inner bases of national existence," but he regarded globalization as a process of leveling and standardization that destroyed diversity and individuality. In a vicious irony, globalization would bring about the unity required for a world literature even as it eradicated the plurality equally requisite to a world literature: "Man will have to accustom himself to existence in a uniformly organized earth, to a single literary culture, in an equally short time, to only a few literary languages, and perhaps even a single literary language. And herewith the thought of Weltliteratur would be at once actualized [verwirklicht] and destroyed." In contradistinction, recent theorists of world literature are more sanguine that the globalization of literary production and consumption has led to the proliferation of differences and struggles against homogenization.
One can speculate that the ascendance of a spatial conception of the world in literary studies is part of a broader attempt to reckon with the implications of globalization for the study of literature. These new theories of world literature arise in a time of the delegitimation of the humanities in universities and public consciousness in the North Atlantic, and this necessarily creates pressure on literary studies to justify the value of literature as an object of study, especially its efficaciousness in the production of value, material or spiritual. While the work of a corporate lawyer, accountant, or software engineer has practical utility and economic value because it is directly part of the process of economic production, literary criticism's role in the production process is unclear, other than the part it may play in the generation of cultural capital and, more indirectly, in social reproduction and the augmentation of human capital. Exploring how a global approach can transform the parameters and the very object of literary studies (for example, the style and formal features of literary works) as well as the bearing of globalization on the normative consequences of literary studies (for example, exposing the ethical limitations of national literary traditions) may be a fruitful way of bringing out literature's place in and causal relation to our contemporary global existence and, which is not quite the same thing, the worldly aspect of literature. The causality of literature is also at stake here, but in a very different way from what Auerbach had in mind. For theorists of the new world literature, it is a matter of how literature operates as a real object of exchange and circulation in the world and constitutes a world of its own that transcends national boundaries and operates with its own specific laws and logic.
However, instead of affirming the causal power of literature, the analogy between world literature and the circulation of commodities in a global market unwittingly has the opposite effect of diminishing literature's worldly force and, therefore, its causality in relation to the world globalization creates. For what can the logical consequence of such an analogy be other than to make world literature a transmitter of global social forces? To think of the dynamics of world literature in terms of those of a global market is precisely to think of world literature as mimicking these global forces, of being a displaced and delayed communication of socioeconomic forces at work in the real world. In the final analysis, literature's worldliness would derive from its being a passive reflection of the forces at work in a global market in the specificity of its own sphere.
Literature's Worldliness: The Allure of the Market Metaphor and the Force of Globalization
Let us examine more closely the consequences of viewing world literature by analogy with market exchange. The primary allure of the market metaphor for understanding literature's worldliness is the promise of negative freedom: the liberation from a national framework's stifling strictures on appreciating and studying literature and the reductive aesthetic and evaluative criteria imposed by ossified national literary traditions on writers and the public criticism of literature. Just as contemporary global markets and the liberalization of trade and financial flows have brought about the erosion of national-state regulated economies and the thorough privatization of the means of production and the revolution in technology and communications has undermined state control over information and knowledge, thereby leading to genuinely global economic interdependence, as opposed to the independent sovereignty of national-state economies, so too the globalization of literary exchange and production is said to lead to the emergence of world literature, a form of literature that has rendered merely national literature obsolete and illusory. The "world" is thus an adjective attached to the noun "literature" to qualify it. "World literature" is contrasted with merely national literature. The main consequence of this approach is that it takes the world for granted. It conflates the world with the globe and reduces the world to a spatial object produced by the material processes of globalization.
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments viiIntroduction. Missed Encounters: Cosmopolitanism, World Literature, and Postcoloniality 1
Part I. The World of World in Literature in Question
1. The New World Literature: Literary Studies Discovers Globalization 23
2. The World According to Hegel: Culture and Power in World History 46
3. The World as Market: The Materialist Inversion of Spiritualist Models of the World 60
Part II. Worlding and Unworlding: Worldliness, Narrative, and "Literature" in Phenomenology and Deconstruction
4. Worlding: The Phenomenological Concept of Worldliness and the Loss of World in Modernity 95
5. The In-Between World: Anthropologizing the Force of Worlding 131
6. The Arriving World: The Inhuman Otherness of Time as Real Messianic Hope 161
Part III. Of Other Worlds to Come
7. Postcolonial Openings: How Postcolonial Literature Becomes World Literature 191
8. Projecting a Future World from the Memory of Precolonial Time 216
9. World Heritage Preservation and the Expropriation of Subaltern Worlds 246
10. Resisting Humanitarianization 278
Epilogue. Without Conclusion: Stories without End(s) 310
Notes 333
Select Bibliography 369
Index 383
What People are Saying About This
"Unafraid of controversy, Pheng Cheah prompts his readers to think and rethink their own critical, philosophical, and literary commitments. A remarkable book."
"Pheng Cheah makes a compelling argument for literature’s worldly force, its ways of impacting the ethico-political problems of the world. This is exactly what the humanities need now."
"Wide-ranging and complexly argued, What is a World? gives us a theory of world literature inspired by Heidegger, Arendt, and Derrida, locating the variety and volatility of the literary field in the finiteness of humans and the destabilizing infrastructure of time."
"Setting out to provide a systematic and analytical account of the notion of the world—and worlding—Pheng Cheah rethinks world literature not as the inevitable outcome of globalization, or as a reaction to the world system, but as part of the capitalist conceptual reconfiguration of the world. Powerful and provocative, What is a World? makes a significant, timely, and radical intervention."