Heine and World Literature

There seems to be a certain agreement that world literature, as it is handled today, requires attention to the historical and cultural specifics of the context of its production. However, current scholarship continues to fixate on Goethe and the discourse his idea of world literature spawned. Remarkably, Heine’s contemporary critique of the Goethean vision is curiously absent from a debate that prides itself on taking the genealogy of its discourse seriously. This paper highlights how Heine offers a forgotten yet decisive critical supplement, one that challenges and reimagines the project of world literature performatively and with a difference, both in an early theoretical intervention and in his critical and poetic production, and in an often strikingly suggestive fashion

Aesthetics · Archaeology · Art · Context (archaeology · Epistemology · Intervention (counseling · Literature · Poetry · Political science · Scholarship · Sociology · World literature · Comparative and World Literature · German Colonialism and Identity Studies · German Literature and Culture Studies · History · Law · Philosophy · Psychology