What Is World Literature? (Translation/Transnation)

Rating:
Summary: question raised
Review: The author of this essay, a series of chapters trying to define a literary category, is smart and writes engagingly in witty and clear prose for an academic. I recommend this book because it holds several strong chapters on translation and politics of publishing. But, despite best efforts, the titular question remains addressed in unsatisfying fashion. It seems there is so much to say about the politics of reception and lack of reception, about the politics of literary influence and trade, that the book contains less about literature than one might desire from such a well-read guide. Good sense needs no method, but here, in spite of some good sense the author has chosen curiously, eccentrically, the texts with which to make his discussion. The common qualities that bind the chapters pertain more to the context of readers, editors, and occasionally writers. Greaer balance must be achieved. There is too little discussion of the literature itself. Surely, it is too blandly limiting to consider world literature merely a mark of consumer culture and national expectations for others, the literature remaining nearly at all times secondary to the category. Only some scattered anecdotes will lead readers to understand the cause of the author's dedication to literature and comparatism.

The range of the author is admirably broad. It is possible readers of this book will come away with a burning desire to read a book or author mentioned by Damrosch. The bibliography given is remarkably trim for such an undertaking. It seems to me that this book adopts more of the literary discourse concerning the relation of power and knowledge in the formation of literature than the philological attention characteristic of an academic tradition that has been comparing languages and national literatures for centuries (granted, rarely having addressed the question Damrosch approaches). Though the author floats Auerbach's in and out of his discussion as an exemplar of an earlier attempt to give definition to the idea of world literature (even if drastically limited that author's own expertise in the languages of Europe), a , this book is not, and to be fair, did not intend to be.

The best discussions, I felt, concerned Gilgamesh, early Egyptian poems, and Rigoberta Mench/u. In the end, the definition made for world literature seems a general and useful point of departure for authors of better books to come on the topic.