World Literature According to Its Poster Children

Some of the most influential pronouncements on world literature have been made by the kind of authors who are most likely to emerge as representatives of world literature once we agree on a definition, including Goethe, the young Marx, Tagore, Gorky, Hesse, Kundera, and the distinguished signatories of the manifesto for a world-literature in French. Breaking out of this vicious circle by referring to the authority of pure theorists of world literature is not the solution, as this would only pull us into a new vicious circle where most of these theorists would mostly remind us of the names that we already met in the first circle. At best, we would be reminded that the level of theory is not a metalevel. This realization that there is no metalanguage can, however, spark theoretical work. It can help us grasp the discourse on world literature as an outgrowth of a language, a code in which statements about world literature tend to be formulated. These statements, although offering little consensus, are all texts. As such, they can be read in a way that can nonetheless lead to some consensus regarding world literature. Specifically, these texts seem to use the notion of world literature to either historize the notion’s Goethean legacy, or discuss the world-historical potential of their time. These two features are distributed remarkably evenly between the theorists and the practitioners of world literature, respectively; together, they form the constitutive binary opposition of the language of the debate on world literature

Binary opposition · First World · Happening · Life world · Manifesto · Metalanguage · World literature · World view · Comparative and World Literature · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies · Translation Studies and Practices