Re-mapping World Literature

Overview & Synopsis

The concept at issue in this book is Weltliteratur, or World Literature. Theoretical frameworks usually view the now-famous epistolary exchange between Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and the young Johann Peter Eckermann as the true foundation of the concept, (though earlier promoters of similar ideas, such as August Wilhelm Schlegel can be cited)1. Goethe wrote this to Eckermann in a well-known letter in 1827: “National literature is now a rather unmeaning term; the epoch of World Literature is at hand, and everyone must strive to hasten its approach”2. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels as well as Richard Moulton and Erich Auerbach, among many others, also all contributed to the category from their respective historical moments and theoretical perspectives. Marx and Engels, of course, took a materialist point of view that emphasized the expansion of the capitalist economic project and its progressive conquest of the world as a market. Richard Moulton and Erich Auerbach, on the other hand, came from a humanistic philological perspective that, as Jérôme David has put it in his reflections on the different genealogies of World Literature, “derived from the anxious preoccupation with what the literary works mean” (2013: 14) and focused very early on the problems of translation and canonization that would become crucial for the conceptual debates of our time