Zusammenfassung
In the ever-expanding corpus of writing about world literature, it is an all too common occurrence to read some foundational quotes by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe , and then to jump directly to Erich Auerbach or even to more recent scholars such as David Damrosch or Gayatri Spivak , thus bracketing more than a century of ‘Arbeit an der Weltliteratur’, which I will argue here includes critiques of and resistance to world literature.
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Notes
- 1.
Ernst Moritz Arndt : Lasset euch nicht verführen, oder die Weltliteratur. In: Schriften an und für seine lieben Deutschen. Leipzig 1842, pp. 307–332, p. 312.
- 2.
Literally, “work on world literature”, coined off the title of Hans Blumenberg ’s Arbeit am Mythos (Frankfurt a. M. 1979). Blumenberg ’s treatment of myth works against its reification (see section I below), and he includes the cyclically repeating critiques of myth or laments for its death, as well as myth’s constant rebirthings in a variety of forms and media.
- 3.
See B. Venkat Mani : Recoding World Literature. Libraries, Print Culture, and Germany’s Pact with Books. New York 2017; Peter Goßens: Weltliteratur - Modelle transnationaler Literaturwahrnehmung im 19. Jahrhundert. Stuttgart 2011; John Pizer: The Idea of World Literature. History and Pedagogical Practice. Baton Rouge 2006.
- 4.
André Comte-Sponville : Critique. In: Dictionnaire philosophique. Paris 2001, p. 138.
- 5.
See Sarah Brouillette: Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace. New York 2007; Mani, Recoding World Literature, pp. 9–21.
- 6.
Erich Auerbach : Philologie der Weltliteratur. In: Weltliteratur. Festgabe für Fritz Strich zum 70. Geburtstag. Ed. by Walter Muschg and Emil Staiger. Bern 1952, pp. 39–50, p. 39.
- 7.
- 8.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: [Einleitung zu] Thomas Carlyle, „Leben Schillers“. In: Gesammelte Werke. Vol. XVIII: Schriften zur Literatur. Berlin 2011, pp. 397–412, p. 399.
- 9.
Stefan Hoesl-Uhlig: Changing Fields. The Directions of Goethe ’s Weltliteratur. In: Christopher Prendergast (ed.): Debating World Literature. London 2004, pp. 26–53, p. 53.
- 10.
See Jan Hilgevoord/Jos Uffink: The Uncertainty Principle. In: The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, https://plato.stanford.edu (01.02.2019).
- 11.
See Walter Cohen: A History of European Literature. The West and the World from Antiquity to the Present. Oxford 2017.
- 12.
Clive Scott: The Work of Literary Translation. Cambridge 2018, p. 13.
- 13.
Randall Collins : The Sociology of Philosophies. A Global Theory of Intellectual Change. Cambridge MA 1998, pp. 19–20.
- 14.
Walter Benjamin : Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers. In: Gesammelte Schriften. Vol. IV/1. Frankfurt a. M. 1972, pp. 10–11.
- 15.
Emily Apter : Against World Literature. New York 2013, p. 3.
- 16.
See ibid., pp. 117–90.
- 17.
Ibid., pp. 155.
- 18.
Barbara Cassin (ed.): Vocabulaire européen des philosophies: dictionnaire des intraduisibles. Paris 2004.
- 19.
Oswald Spengler : Der Untergang des Abendlandes. München 1963, p. 684.
- 20.
See Alexander Beecroft: An Ecology of World Literature. From Antiquity to the Present Day. London/New York 2015, pp. 33–34 and 37–99.
- 21.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: Translating in a World of Languages. In: Profession (2010), pp. 35–43, p. 36.
- 22.
Waïl S. Hassan: World Literature in the Age of Globalization. Reflections on an Anthology. In: College English 63.1 (2000), pp. 38–47, p. 42.
- 23.
Collins , The Sociology of Philosophies, p. 21.
- 24.
Karl Marx/Friedrich Engels: Manifesto of the Communist Party. In: The Marx-Engels Reader. Ed. by Robert C. Tucker. New York 1978, pp. 469–500, p. 476–77.
- 25.
S. S. Prawer: Karl Marx and World Literature. Oxford 1976, p. 145.
- 26.
Wilhelm Amann/Dieter Heimböckel: Karl Marx interkulturell. Aus gegebenem Anlass. In: Zeitschrift für interkulturelle Germanistik 9/1 (2018), pp. 169–71, p. 170.
- 27.
The Warwick Collective: Combined and Uneven Development. Towards a New Theory of World-Literature. Liverpool 2015, p. X.
- 28.
Durs Grünbein: Weltliteratur. Ein Panoramagemälde. In: Warum schriftlos leben? Aufsätze. Frankfurt a. M. 2003, pp. 23–33, p. 25–26.
- 29.
Pheng Cheah: What is a World? Durham NC 2016, p. 73.
- 30.
Ibid., p. 129.
- 31.
Vilém Flusser: Zwiegespräche. Interviews 1967–1991. Göttingen 1967, pp. 153–54.
- 32.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: [Ferneres über Weltliteratur]. In: Gesammelte Werke. Vol. XVIII: Schriften zur Literatur. Berlin 2011, pp. 429–30.
- 33.
Johannes Scherr (ed.): Bildersaal der Weltliteratur. Stuttgart 1848.
- 34.
Friedrich Nietszche: Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik. Ed. by G. Colli and M. Montinari. München 1980, pp. 119–20.
- 35.
See Moriz Carrière: Die Kunst im Zusammenhang der Culturentwickelung und die Ideale der Menscheit. 5 Vol. Leipzig 1863–1873.
- 36.
Dennis Schmidt : On Germans and Other Greeks. Tragedy and Ethical Life. Bloomington 2001, p. 215.
- 37.
See Weigui Fang (ed.): Tensions in World Literature. Between the Local and the Universal. New York 2018.
- 38.
See Thomas O. Beebee: What the World Thinks About Literature. In: Ursula Heise (ed.): Futures of Comparative Literature. ACLA State of the Discipline Report. New York 2017, pp. 61–70.
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Beebee, T.O. (2019). On the Never-To-Be-Completed Project of Critiquing World Literature. In: Lamping, D., Tihanov, G. (eds) Vergleichende Weltliteraturen / Comparative World Literatures. J.B. Metzler, Stuttgart. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-476-04925-4_20
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