Debating World Literature [Paperback]

Christopher Prendergast (Editor), Benedict Anderson (Contributor), Emily Apter (Contributor), Stanley Corngold (Contributor), Nicholas Dew (Contributor), Simon Goldhill (Contributor), Stephen Heath (Contributor), Stefan Hoesel-Uhlig (Contributor), Peter Madsen (Contributor), Franco Moretti (Contributor), Francesca Orsini (Contributor), Timothy J. Reiss (Contributor), Bruce Clunies Ross (Contributor), Elisa Sampson Vera Tudela (Contributor), John Sturrock (Contributor)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 1859844588 | ISBN-13: 978-1859844588 | Publication Date: February 28, 2004

Goethe's Weltliteratur, and the cultural forms of globalization.

In the continuing debates about the cultural dimensions of globalization, the question of 'literature' has been something of a poor relation. This volume seeks to redress the balance. Its starting point is Goethe's idea of Weltliteratur, from which it travels out to various parts of the globe at different historical junctures. Its concerns include the legacy of Goethe's idea, variable understandings of the term 'literature' itself, cross-cultural encounters (the contact of the oral and the written, the paradoxes of 'exoticism'), the nature of 'small literatures', and the cultural politics of literary genres (poetry and the novel). The underlying objective of the volume is to transcend the pieties and simplifications of polemic in a seach for the complexity embodied in the linking of the two terms 'world' and 'literature'.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Quite what Weltliteratur meant (to Goethe and his age) and what it means (or might mean) to us are still very live issues, if only for the reason that "globalization", if it exits at all, is not a state of a process, something still in the making. Goethe's idea was itself cast in the form of a thought-experiment, a groping reach for a barely glimpsed future. ... By the same token, what we make of it today is necessarily open to indefinitely extended reflection and debate." -- Christopher Prendergast

About the Author

Christopher Prendergast is Professor of Modern French Literature at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of King’s College Cambridge. He is the co-editor of World Reader, an anthology of world literature.

Benedict Anderson is Aaron L. Binenkorp Professor of International Studies Emeritus at Cornell University. He is editor of the journal Indonesia and author of Java in a Time of Revolution, The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia, and the World and Imagined Communities.

Stanley Corngold is a professor emeritus of German and comparative literature at Princeton University and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His highly acclaimed translations include Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis and Kafka's Selected Stories. He lives in Princeton, New Jersey.

Franco Moretti teaches English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He is the author of Signs Taken for Wonders, The Way of the World and Modern Epic, all from Verso.

Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Verso (February 28, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1859844588
• ISBN-13: 978-1859844588
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.6 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #610,024 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)