The Routledge Companion to World Literature and World History

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
World Literature ◽  
World History

scholarly journals A minor philosophy of world: From the anthropological illusion to Relation in area studies

2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 31-48
Author(s):  
Travis Workman
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Cultural Anthropology ◽  
World History ◽  
Modernization Theory ◽  
World Culture ◽  
Area Studies ◽  
The World ◽  
A Minor

This article discusses Édouard Glissant’s theory of Relation as a minor philosophy of world that breaks from the spatialization of time and the anthropological cosmopolitanism of Enlightenment thought and Cold War area studies. The first part connects two dominant Cold War area studies discourses—modernization theory and cultural anthropology—to Immanuel Kant’s Anthropology and Michel Foucault’s reading of it, showing how area studies discourses participate in an old Enlightenment problem of what Foucault calls the “anthropological illusion.” The article then connects Glissant’s criticism of generalization and his idea of the “world” to the critique of area studies, showing how the spatiotemporality of Glissant’s Relation disarticulates the area studies framework and its mode of racializing the poetics of world history, world literature, and world culture.

‘World literature’ as a problem and challenge

2019 ◽  
pp. 13-33
Author(s):  
I. O. Shaytanov
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Differences ◽  
World Literature ◽  
World History ◽  
The Other ◽  
Global Literature ◽  
The One ◽  
Historical Origins

The article focuses on the conception, transformation, and operation of the term ‘world literature’, including its historical origins and modern problematics. When meaning is problematized, and the reality of world history is radically revised, the changes cannot but affect the derivative phenomenon of world literature, where historical challenges give rise to the need for reconstruction of its very concept and clarification of its components (language, culture, nation, and territory), as well as of the nature of their connection. The author distinguishes between world, or global, literature, on the one hand, and globalization, multiculturalism, and other concepts, on the other. He argues that cultural references in a ‘post-national’ world are doomed, and that world literature, rather than neutralizing cultural differences, should identify and define them, also by comparison.

Periods versus Concepts: Space Making and the Question of Postcolonial Literary History

PMLA ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 127 (2) ◽  
pp. 342-348 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ato Quayson
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Literary History ◽  
World Literature ◽  
World History ◽  
Medieval Period ◽  
Spatial Practices ◽  
Spatial Logic ◽  
Princeton University ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Colonial Encounter

After being exiled from nazi germany and completing the extraordinary mimesis in istanbul in 1946, erich auerbach wrote from Princeton University in 1952, “Literary criticism now participates in a practical seminar on world history. … Our philological home is the earth: it can no longer be the nation.” Auerbach, who must be reckoned one of the great synthesists and literary historians of the twentieth century, was expressing a sentiment that will be familiar to anyone who has thought about world literature from a postcolonial perspective. While postcolonial literary studies may have helped define the parameters of the practical seminar on world history, its full implications are still somewhat obscured by the arguments about periodicity that are often taken as a terminological necessity in applications of the term postcolonial. This is the burden imposed by the temporalizing post-. However, closer scrutiny of the postcolonial suggests that it contains mutually reinforcing periodizing and spatial functions. Many of the most common ideas that circulate in the field, such as colonial encounter, neocolonialism, nationalism and postnationalism, hegemony, transnationalism, diasporas, and globalization, are organized around often unacknowledged spatial motifs. The concept of space that implicitly structures usages of postcolonialism is far from inert: there is an active dimension of spatializing in them that helps shape the field's distinctiveness. This is because even when the term is deployed exclusively for periodizing purposes, as in showing that the medieval period or Russia today is amenable to a postcolonial analysis, the nature of what is highlighted insistently invokes spatial practices. Once the spatial logic of postcolonialism is brought to the foreground, the complexity of its critical diagnostic as applied in the practical seminar on world history becomes clearer.

World Authorship

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Real World ◽  
World Literature ◽  
World History ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Human Element ◽  
The People ◽  
The World ◽  
Real Places ◽  
Different Parts

Booksellers, authors, and academics have been talking about world literature since Goethe made the term fashionable in the early nineteenth century. Yet amidst all the talk of books that ‘circulate’ and literature as a kind of ‘universal property’ that can function as a ‘window on the world’, how do we account for the people who live in real places, and who write, translate, market, and read the texts that travel on these global journeys? This handbook breaks new ground by showing how to bring together the real-world contexts of authorship with the literary worlds of fiction through the concept of the world author. ‘World authorship’ is a practical update on Michel Foucault’s ‘author function’ that significantly expands the network of people and practices involved with literature and is at the same time more grounded in the study of actual literary texts. The concept is set out in detail in a rigorous introduction followed by twenty-five keyword chapters that cover all core aspects of world authorship, from ‘Beginnings’ to ‘Voice’, and have been written by professionals who work right across the sector. In its entirety, the handbook illuminates how literature is made and shared in different parts of the world and at different times of world history. At the heart of all contributions, however, is one key question: where is the human element in world literature? Established authors, translators, publishers, prize judges, and festival coordinators as well as academics from a range of different disciplinary backgrounds collectively give us the answer.

scholarly journals Welt (World)

2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
John Noyes
Keyword(s):  
World Literature ◽  
World History ◽  
Science And Literature

Goethe uses the word Welt (world) repeatedly in his writings, especially in his poetry, both singularly and in compounds, to establish a rich constellation of nature, divinity, and subjectivity, managed discursively at the intersection of economics, science, and literature. The most widely discussed example is Weltliteratur (world literature), but his understanding of Welt is equally evident in such compounds as Weltgeschichte (world history), Weltseele (world soul), Weltgeist (world spirit), Weltensumpf (world morass), Weltregiment (world regime), Weltwirrwesen (tumultuous world essence), Weltenschöpfer (world creator), Weltbürger (world citizen), Weltfrömmigkeit (world piety), and many more. I will focus in this lexicon entry on Goethe’s cosmological and phenomenological understandings of Welt, with the aim of showing how he enables the latter by his treatment of the former. Welt is such a widespread concept that it is not possible to do justice to all aspects of its use. As a result, the main textual references used in this entry are Faust, the Wilhelm Meister novels, and the poem “Auf dem See” (1775/89; On the Lake).

scholarly journals Mapowanie kanonu. Literatura polska w perspektywie światowej

2021 ◽  
pp. 395-413
Author(s):  
Małgorzata Mikołajczak
Keyword(s):  
World Literature ◽  
World History ◽  
Research Proposal ◽  
Traditional Model ◽  
Polish Literature ◽  
Global Context ◽  
The World ◽  
Research Concept ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Literature

The article discusses the research proposal presented in Światowa historia literatury polskiej. Interpretacje [World History of Polish Literature. Interpretations], edited by Magdalena Popiel, Tomasz Bilczewski and Stanley Bill. Mikołajczak contrasts the research concept of world literature with the dominant approaches to the world literature in the area of contemporary literary studies and the traditional model of the history of literature. She reflects on the situation of Polish literature in the world, taking into account the ways in which Polish works circulate in other cultural circles, the possibilities and limitations of translation as well as shifts within the canon. She also indicates the opportunities that open up for Polish literature in the global context.

Lukács and Dostoevsky: Reading Dostoevsky as a Milestone on the Road to Bolshevism

2021 ◽  
pp. 38-49
Author(s):  
Yuriy V. Puschaev ◽  
◽  
Keyword(s):  
World Literature ◽  
Social Ties ◽  
World History ◽  
Socialist Revolution ◽  
The Road ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Totality ◽  
On The Road ◽  
The Individual

The article is devoted to the influence of the interpretation of the works of the great Russian writer F.M. Dostoevsky on early Lukacs in the pre-revolution­ary years. Reading Dostoevsky’s works played an important role in his transition to the position of Bolshevism. The early Lukacs emphasized that Dostoevsky in­structed his atheist heroes to express their real position. Through the prism of these heroes, he interpreted the problem of revolutionary terrorism, drawing on the works of B. Savinkov. The early Lukacs also saw the greatness of Dosto­evsky in the fact that he was the first in world literature to turn to the “reality of the soul”, began to describe it, while ordinary external life (social ties, social sta­tus, etc.), although generated by the soul, is secondary and insignificant. These ideas of the early Lukacs are a kind of precursor to his future Marxist ideas of reification and alienation. The early Lukacs vehemently denies inauthentic ordi­nary life, but this denial is still metaphysically existential. After his “leap” into a new faith, Lukacs interprets what he previously understood as “inauthentic life” through the prism of early Marx, dialectically and socially-historically, through the categories of “reification”, the socialist revolution, and the prole­tariat as a privileged subject-object of world history. For Lukacs, the Marxist, the true reality will no longer be the individual soul, but the social totality and prac­tice. However, it is characteristic that Lukacs’ path to unconditional acceptance of the philosophy of Marxism and Bolshevism lay, among other things, through his fascination with the work of Dostoevsky

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