Ashley’s Reviews > World Literature in Theory > Status Update

...if you want to know what a man is, you must know what he loves. It shows in which objects of the universe he finds his own self, how far he has been able to disperse his own being. Where I do not feel love, my soul has reached its limits.

Meltzl wished to rescue Goethe’s conception of world literature from an emphasis on a nat’l literature’s absorption of foreign influences & its own impact abroad. Where Schlegel – & indeed Goethe – had looked forward to German as taking a prominent or even dominant role in cultural exchange, M & B sought to showcase languages & literatures usually overlooked from great-power perspectives.

This chapter is an essay by John Pizer in which he discusses Goethe's “world literature” (Weltliteratur) paradigm in its historical origins in a period of uneasy cosmopolitanism in the wake of the Congress of Vienna. The world literature paradigm arose in this milieu, & can be seen as an attempt to transcend the budding, albeit often cultural & localized, nationalism after the Napoleonic Wars. It’s heavy stuff

The first essay in this volume is Conversations with Eckermann on Weltliteratur (1827) by Goethe, wherein his conversations with Eckermann give a vivid picture of the possibilities and the parameters of world literature as seen by a leading practitioner. I can’t help but notice though how Western Europe remains the privileged modern world of reference for him.

This second section of the volume takes up the status of world literature in the age of globalization. "Though this process has accelerated in recent decades, it was already fully underway in the early decades of the 20th century, when the growth of worldwide literary networks gave new impetus to reflection on the possibilities and the challenges for literary circulation on a worldwide scale."

I’m excited about this one! The first part of this volume brings together important statements on word literature from the 1820s through the 1920s. L, beginning with Goethe’s seminal reflections on Weltliteratur. A pair of essays follows giving prime examples of theoretical and methodological reflection by two pioneers of the academic study of comparative and world literature. And that’s just this first part :)