Comparing Modern Literatures Worldwide

In the 2011 issue of the MLA's Profession, David Porter notes that, following Goethe's call for a new age of Weltliteratur in the early nineteenth century, since the mid-1990s the notion of “world literature” has reemerged “as the most promising rubric for imagining a major paradigm shift in the study and teaching of literature and for thinking beyond the dead ends of traditional comparative study.”1While no consensus has been reached on what it might mean, this recent reemergence of the notion of world literature has become a focus for debate over new possibilities implicit in the idea of global literatures. Porter cites in particular three noteworthy avenues for critical discussion: David Damrosch's What Is World Literature?, Pascale Casanova's The World Republic of Letters, and Franco Moretti's Graphs, Maps, Trees. Like other contributors to this forum, I find these three works particularly suggestive of the current state of thinking concerning comparative literary studies.In What is World Literature?, Damrosch develops a framework for world literature that is cosmopolitan in terms of a multiplicity not of origins but of trajectories. That is, world literatures are literatures that circulate beyond their cultures of origin and in doing so have an effect on other cultures beyond the linguistic and institutional borders circumscribed by overtly national literatures.2Casanova offers in The World Republic of Letters a sociological account of the world of literature as a rule-bound, hierarchical formation. The “world republic of letters,” she argues, is not the open, liberal, democratic marketplace of ideas but a “rigidly stratified social structure where access to broad markets is tightly controlled by a powerful caste of critics, publishers, and translators, whose authority is legitimized through their association with recognized literary centers such as Paris or New York.”3 This caste of gatekeepers functions across political and linguistic lines and helps create a body of literary works that share metropolitan features, even when they come from outside French or English, the traditional sites of “world literature.”In Graphs, Maps, Trees, Moretti also takes literary circulation and transformation as his starting point but offers a set of more radical methodological alternatives—drawing as models for literary analysis “graphs from quantitative history, maps from geography, and trees from evolutionary theory”—in proposing that literary scholars rethink their dependence on close reading.4 “Distant reading,” distance being understood as “a specific form of knowledge,” reveals what close reading cannot.5 As Porter rightly notes, this attention to the macroscopic patterns and processes that shape the literary landscape works on scales beyond individual texts and authors, and its most obvious benefit is that it includes the 99 percent of literary production typically excluded by any canon from visibility and relevance.6Porter concludes from his survey of the return of “world literature” that what Damrosch, Casanova, and Moretti share is a concept of world literature that “stresses the mobility of texts and the permeability of traditions.”7 Each makes clear that world literature is not the sum of national literatures “but rather a dynamic model of ... a constantly shifting field of circulation, transmutation, and contestation.”8 This conclusion is of central concern: what might a field of comparative studies that was not based on national literatures, or even singular canonic examples, look like? How would such a field be organized? And is the MLA structure, indeed any institutional structure, adequate to the study of transnational literary formations?As a scholar who has learned from and adapted these observations to my own main area of comparative study, the hemispheric Americas, I think that the work of this group of literary historians helps us reconsider what Porter identifies as the “relation between the processes of differentiation and diffusion that govern the spread and regeneration of literary forms in a global literary space.”9 In that context, probably the first observation worth making is that a new vocabulary for naming, studying, and comparing the hemispheric Americas and their literatures has emerged over the past twenty years, representing a battery of interesting alternatives to be considered. With the emergence of other approaches, such as diasporic studies, comparative studies in race and ethnicity, studies in globalization and the global South, and the transnational turn in cultural studies, coupled with the resurgence of the very idea of world literature itself, the fundamental terms of analysis and description in the context of contemporary comparative literary study deserve highlighting.Globalization and the vision of the globe implied by that contemporary term of everyday discourse do not just belong to the neocons, neoliberals, or end-of-history triumphalists. The “world” of “world literature” and of diverse cultural studies and changing disciplinary practices is also becoming globalized and “worlded” in a Heideggerian sense that denotes how things become intelligible to human beings by virtue of being part of an interpreted and structured context of meaning.10 This “worlding” of world literature produces alternative expressions of what can count and mean as “literature” that are every bit as powerful as critical terms as the former vocabularies of ideological analysis. These terms emphasize the public impact of the emergence of global systems from disparate critical angles of vision, multiple frameworks, social situations, and knowledge/power field practices that are, as yet, emerging, fluid, and undertheorized. The point of these critical angles of vision is not simply hermeneutical. More powerfully, they carry out social analyses of contemporary ruling structures with the end of formulating the possibility of social justice.The transdisciplinary practices, transnational literacies, and multisited interventions that globalization and the idea of world literature projects require help us envision and shape keener expressions of what contemporary differential, transnational, and borderlands projects can and must do now, moving beyond the postmodern/postcolonial formulations of “comparative world literatures.” What is crucial in all of these formulations is the sense that no process of worlding or globalization is anywhere near over and done with as a historical process of world formation. So how are we going to talk about it even as it continues to change before our very eyes? The goal of programs of study based in attempts to reformulate the goals of comparative literature and comparative cultural studies generally is one of turning emergent forms of theorizing and cultural activist writing into new cultural poetics adequate to dealing with new world realities. I take this project to coincide with the one that Gayatri Spivak described recently as one of “translation”—that is, as a process of poiesis that is not mere imitation of an original but an imaginative creation in another mode, situated in the very differential between copy and original.11Current debates on the meaning of citizenship have refocused attention away from notions of civil rights that depend on the existence of a social contract within the framework of the nation-state and toward ways in which the processes of decolonization and migration, as well as social identities based on ethnicity, race, and sexuality, point to the existence of identities other than national ones for defining citizenship. They offer a direct challenge to the traditional language of citizenship and liberal democratic notions that tie citizenship and liberal democratic rights indissolubly to state affiliation.So, what happens when we move the discussion of citizenship and “rights” away from the idea of the nation state, not toward a mythic postnational state but instead to the realm of the transnation? The fictive entities with subject status that we call corporations have worked imaginatively precisely to create a sense of those transnational rights. One powerful function of aesthetic education in the age of globalization might be then to teach us how to conceive of transnational rights for individual and collective bodies of subjects, represented most saliently by the participants in the massive labor diasporas from south to north in the last decades of the twentieth century. This is the actively creative act of poiesis in translation that Spivak refers to in regard to a rethinking of comparativism, a process that she describes as “an active practice.”12This concern for the active practice of translation as an act of re-creation is acutely visible in the area of comparative work, which is my own—the transnational literatures of the Americas. These literatures, represented most powerfully by such works as Junot Díaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and Salvador Plascencia's The People of Paper, typically draw not only from the grand traditions of the various American national literatures but also from the traditions of vernacular narrative, popular culture, and the literary avant-garde.13 They do so for several reasons, one of which is to show the constant and complete dissonance between the redemptive course of the history of the Americas with its origins in conquest and the psychic façades that bar the way to memories of the traumatic past of the Americas.These are issues I have elaborated more fully in other work.14 In this context, it is worth noting that in Plascencia's and Díaz's writings, as in those of a whole generational cohort of contemporary writers from the transnational American global South, neither literary realism, nor modernist estrangement, nor postmodern play, nor magical realist wonder alone can suffice as formal stand-ins for the concrete content of justice. The representation of social justice is not and should not be taken to be the same thing as its felicitous performance. How, then, can one possibly conceive of a narrativity to still the chaos unleashed by modern political terror? How to create ethnic romance from consciousness colonized by self-hate and self-doubt? What would a literature of political and racial romance, sensation, gothic, marvels, fantasy, and absolute otherness appropriate to transporting us to the margins of the imaginary and the symbolic accomplish that earlier forms of U.S. ethnic literature have not? What would its referential world look like? And most significantly, what could it accomplish as a symbolic representation of real history? In the works of transnational American writers, the representation of social justice requires a new and different formal medium incorporating states of fantasy that occupy and override previous attempts to represent the real. To show how this is accomplished is the task of contemporary comparative literary study.As we move firmly into the second decade of the twenty-first century, what is clear is the need for a new paradigm for broadly global as well as for more local ways of studying culture and literature. This new poiesis of comparative study ought to be based on a new sense of the dynamics of how knowledge is generated and how human resources are used and should recognize the rich reservoir of knowledge that exists in languages and cultures that have in the past not been deemed worthy of study or comparison. The aim of critical work undertaken by comparative studies and comparing literatures worldwide might well be to ensure that the variety of regions that we can for convenience's sake call the global South receive their due on the basis of their own rich heritage in a world of equals that are not classed in the static categories that Casanova decries or the exclusive formulations of cultural political practice to which Moretti's method of “distant reading” offers such a powerful rejoinder. We have an incalculable stake in ensuring the success of the comparative critical projects that points us toward a new, global, sense of world literature

Comparative and World Literature · History · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies · Translation Studies and Practices