Skip to main content
Log in

Encountering the world

  • Published:
Neohelicon Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

David Damrosch’s writings on world literature envision readers “making themselves at home abroad.” This essay argues against his Thoreauvian optimism, given a world that is too large to grasp or to become a home. World literature cannot be naturalized. Drawing on examples from Leibniz, Achebe, Walcott, and Petrarch, the essay proposes that world literature is best identified in terms not of the value of authors and works, nor of the situations portrayed through the characters and plots, but of the nature of the readerly experience. It examines the style of representation in world literature, which Brian Lennon’s book In Babels Shadow productively characterizes as a kind of kitsch reflecting a struggle to communicate. World literature is not, as Damrosch says, “writing that gains in translation,” but writing that retains its alienness even in the original.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. Damrosch (2009), p. 23.

  2. Damrosch (2003), p. 277. Many chapters of this book and most chapters of the later one end with similar buoyancy.

  3. Clifford (1998), p. 364.

  4. Wang (2010), p. 65.

  5. Cheah (2003), p. 303.

  6. Kincaid (1988), a beautifully sardonic evocation of her native Antigua, ends as follows: “Of course, the whole thing is, once you cease to be a master, once you throw off your master's yoke, you are no longer human rubbish, you are just a human being, and all the things that adds up to. So, too, with the slaves. Once they are no longer slaves, once they are free, they are no longer noble and exalted; they are just human beings” (p. 81).

  7. Notably, a baleful paragraph in Heidegger’s 1938 essay “The Time of the World Picture” sets up a brute contrast confronting individuals with the choice of either being the subject of a community, state, nation, or Volk or else of “sinking into the abyss of subjectivism in the sense of individualism” [des Ausgleitens in das Unwesen des Subjektivismus im Sinne des Individualismus]. Heidegger (1972), p. 85. All unacknowledged translations are my own.

  8. Conrad (1924), p. 277 (Chap. 20), Conrad’s italics.

  9. Leibniz (1969), p. 49.

  10. Thoreau (2008), p. 273.

  11. Robbins (1999), p. 72.

  12. Casanova (2004), p. 154.

  13. Appadurai (1996), p. 182.

  14. Safranski (2005).

  15. Baudrillard (1988), p. 116. The phrases preceding the direct quotation pastiche the opening pages of the final chapter, whose title is in English even in the original French publication.

  16. Berman (1992), original title, Lépreuve de létranger.

  17. Lennon (2010), p. xvii. Lennon’s italics.

  18. Petrarca (1960), poem 35. Editions vary significantly in added punctuation and to a lesser extent in spelling. The “pensive steps” refer to man’s condition in the fallen world and are evoked by the closing lines of Milton’s Paradise Lost, about the expulsion from Paradise: “They hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow/Through Eden took their solitary way.” At least one Milton editor has linked Milton’s lines with a sonnet written after Laura’s death (Milton [1836] 3: 471), where Petrarch writes “Che co’ piè vaghi solitarii e lassi/Porto 'l cor grave e gli occhi umidi e bassi/Al mondo, ch’ è per me un deserto alpestro” (Rime 306: That with wandering, solitary, and weary feet I bear my heavy heart and my moist and downcast eyes about the world, which for me is a mountainous desert). Even closer to Petrarch are Romantic-era poems by Charlotte Smith and Helen Maria Williams that Susan Wolfson links to Milton’s lines in Wolfson (2010), p. 52: respectively, “Pensive I took my solitary way,” and “To foreign climes my pensive steps must roam.” There is evidently a tradition of reading Petrarch as a poet of worldly encounter and not just of private emotion.

  19. The editions use the rare spelling of mesurare here (with only one other instance in the Canzoniere); the normal spelling misurare brings it closer phonetically to misery, miseria.

  20. Friedrich (1964), p. 226.

  21. Chakrabarty (2000), p. 70.

  22. My linkage of lyric directly to the dialectic of global literature departs from Chakrabarty’s treatment of Rabindranath Tagore’s poetry, which he contrasts to Tagore’s prose as “transcendental” and “unmistakably idealist” (p. 174). He attributes to Tagore the view that poetry and prose are “two radically contradictory modes of vision” (p. 179). The notion of a counter-idealization responding to oppression or to colonialization continues in the following chapter on the adda (roughly, social club). Chakrabarty identifies this section of his book as Heideggerian, but the transcendental or religious cast of his discussion is not a good fit. An eloquent new study of the aporia of a global lyric, by contrast, sensitively highlights “the near incompatibility between poetic contemplation and human solidarity”: Ender (2010), p. 123.

  23. Ross, “‘Rhythmical Knots’: The World of English Poetry,” in Prendergast (2004, pp. 291–318), quote from p. 316.

  24. The discussion reverses the order of his title and follows the sequence I have reported and followed in my own characterization. The analysis of the outburst Viva la libertà in Don Giovanni, paraphrased from an essay by Ferenc Feher, is far from self-evident, but it correlates well with the reading of the opera I develop in Brown (2010). I wish I had known it earlier. Other essays in Prendergast (2004), following a related line are Prendergast, “The World Republic of Letters” (pp. 1–25), Stefan Hoesel-Uhlig, “Changing Fields: The Directions of Goethe’s Weltliteratur” (pp. 26–53), and Timothy J. Reiss, “Mapping Identities: Literature, Nationalism: Colonialism” (pp. 110–147). The more practical essays in the second half of the volume, mostly selected for it as republications, also generally represent the same stance, if not always so emphatically; particular notable is Benedict Anderson, “The Rooster’s Egg: Pioneering World Folklore in the Philippines” (pp. 197–213). A fine critique of situationist thinking that has not received the attention it deserves is David Simpson (2002).

  25. On clashing idioms see “Wörter aus der Fremde” (T. W. Adorno [1981]), pp. 216–225. An English version exists, entitled “Words from Abroad” (Adorno [1991]), but the essay’s performative display of intersecting languages cannot be transposed into another idiom. "Abroad," for instance, might suggest exploratory “breadth,” whereas in German Adorno faced a choice between “Ausland” (i.e., “out-land,” a relatively neutral term) and his actual selection, deriving from "fremd," meaning foreign, strange.

  26. For a detailed study of an instance that is not framed in a context of world literature but could be, see Brown (2005).

  27. Fichte (1962), 1:464. Soon after, Fichte began using Welt (world) in connection with a utopian, transcendental realm of universal duty, so for instance throughout the third and final book of Die Bestimmung des Menschen. In this supersensible world, “freedom” coincides with obedience in perfect harmony. I place Damrosch’s “dream” of world literature, with its “realm of freedom,” in this vision, rather than in Fichte’s earlier, harder-edged dialectic.

References

  • Adorno, T. W. (1981). Wörter aus der Fremde. Noten zur Literatur (R. Tiedemann, Ed., pp. 216–232). Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.

  • Adorno, T. W. (1991). Words from abroad. Notes to literature (R. Tiedemann, Ed.; S. W. Nicholson, Trans., pp. 185–199). New York, NY: Columbia University Press.

  • Appadurai, A. (1996). Modernity at large: Cultural dimensions of globalization. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Baudrillard, J. (1988). America (C. Turner, Trans.). New York, NY: Verso.

  • Berman, A. (1992). The experience of the foreign: Culture and translation in romantic Germany (S. Heyvaert, Trans.). Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

  • Brown, M. (2005). In defense of cliché: Radcliffe’s landscapes. In The gothic text (pp. 161–182). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

  • Brown, M. (2010). Non Giovanni: Mozart with Hegel. In “The tooth that nibbles at the soul”: Essays on music and poetry (pp. 251–298). Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press.

  • Casanova, P. (2004). The world republic of letters (M. B. DeBevoise, Trans.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

  • Chakrabarty, D. (2000). Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial thought and historical difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Cheah, P. (2003). Spectral nationality: Passages of freedom from Kant to postcolonial literatures of liberation. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Clifford, J. (1998). Mixed feelings. In P. Cheah, and B. Robbins (Eds.), Cosmopolitics: Thinking and feeling beyond the nation. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

  • Conrad, J. (1924). Lord Jim: A romance. New York, NY: Doubleday.

  • Damrosch, D. (2003). What is world literature? Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

  • Damrosch, D. (2009). How to read world literature. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ender, E. (2010). Homesickness in an expanding world: The case of the nineteenth-century lyric. In C. McDonald & S. Suleiman (Eds.), French global: A new approach to literary history (pp. 110–126). New York, NY: Columbia University Press.

  • Fichte, J. G. (1962). Grundlage der gesamten Wissenschaftslehre. In F. Medicus (Ed.), Ausgewählte Werke in sechs Bänden. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft.

  • Friedrich, H. (1964). Epochen der italienischen Lyrik. Frankfurt: Klostermann.

    Google Scholar 

  • Heidegger, M. (1972). Die Zeit des Weltbildes. In Holzwege (pp. 69–104). Frankfurt: Klostermann.

  • Kincaid, J. (1988). A small place. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

    Google Scholar 

  • Leibniz, G. W. (1969). Essais de théodicée. Paris: Garnier.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lennon, B. (2010). In Babels shadow: Multilingual literatures, monolingual states. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

  • Milton, J. (1836). Poetical works (Rev. H. J. Todd, Ed.). London: Rivington.

  • Petrarca, F. (1960). Le rime (G. Carducci & S. Ferrari, Eds.). Florence: Sansoni.

  • Prendergast, C. (Ed.). (2004). Debating world literature. New York, NY: Verso.

  • Robbins, B. (1999). Feeling global: Internationalism in distress. New York, NY: New York University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Safranski, R. (2005). How much globalization can we bear? (P. Camiller, Trans.). Malden, MA: Polity Press.

  • Simpson, D. (2002). Situatedness, or why we keep saying where were coming from. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

  • Thoreau, H. D. (2008). Walden, civil disobedience and other writings (W. Rossi, Ed.). New York, NY: Norton.

  • Walcott, D. (1992). Omeros. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

  • Wang, N. (2010). (Re)constructing Chinese “identit(ies)” in the age of globalization. In N. Wang (Ed.), Translated modernities literary and cultural perspectives on globalization and China (pp. 65–76). New York, NY: Legas.

  • Wolfson, S. (2010). Romantic interactions: Social being and the turns of literary action. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Marshall Brown.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Brown, M. Encountering the world. Neohelicon 38, 349–365 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11059-011-0102-0

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11059-011-0102-0

Keywords

Navigation