Customer Reviews

The World Republic of Letters (Convergences: Inventories of the Present)

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I read this book in the original (French) while writing my dissertation (comparative literature), and quoted from it often. The writing is engaging, the author covers an encyclopedic range of writers and literary periods, and she brings a compelling theoretical perspective to fundamental questions of cultural development and social history. The book is particularly authoritative in the crucial question of how literary vernaculars legitimate themselves--a question as central to contemporary post-colonial literatures as it was to the early-modern writing of the 16th and 17th centuries. That Casanova can speak meaningfully to readers and researchers at both ends of the modern literary spectrum indicates the magnitude of her scholarly achievement. This is the kind of book that all of us who are in the academic racket would like to have written, and it is one that anyone interested in literary studies would enjoy and profit from reading. I'm looking forward to reading this translation to remind myself of what I liked about the original, and to catch any nuances that my quite non-native command of French would have missed. Thank you, Harvard, for bringing this book out in translation: please put it out in paperback, as well!

While Casanova does appear to be speaking for cultural decentralization (especially where novels are concerned), her argument is so selectively and relentlessly gallocentric she winds up reifying a center-periphery vision that effectively erases alternative centers. She tends to confuse the economic dimension of (relative) cultural hegemony (who has the money to translate, publish, review, distribute?) with what one might call a strictly cultural dimension of hegemony (i.e., excellence, for want of a better word). Excellence is and has always been everywhere. As Hollywood has demonstrated within France itself over the past 40 years, having more money to produce and especially to control channels of distribution is neither a mark (necessarily) of excellence, nor is it (necessarily) a symptom of cultural superiority: it's merely a mark of having more money and organizational power to create, market, and distribute your own "product." Casanova's gallocentric view of the world is distorted badly enough where the 19th and 20th centuries are concerned (she effectively erases the fact, and significance, of writers who did not move to, dream about, or react to Parisian aesthetic dictates, while claiming to want to destabilize Parisian hegemony), although her model works relatively well for this period given the fact that Paris did nevertheless operate, relatively speaking, as something like the hegemonic center Casanova curiously both laments and goes a long way toward naturalizing (a better strategy, of course, would be to focus on the much bigger literary world that was not filtered through Paris). But her account fails utterly (and becomes a lot more like French cultural propaganda than well-informed, even-handed scholarship) when it looks at historical beginnings in the 16th and 17th centuries. Anglophone critics have pointed out the problems with her account of Shakespeare reception and of Paris's position since the 1960s (although they have missed her essential point: alas, neither New York nor even London has taken over the function of Parisian publishing houses where translation is concerned; in the US 2-3 % of books are translated, compared to England's 20-40% in the 18th century). Paris has not been displaced by New York and London; New York and London have participated in the increasing parochialism of an Anglophone world more than ever functioning like a giant cultural island with its back to a very much larger, diverse, vital world out there. It is not obvious to me that ANY city is now fulfilling Paris's 19th to mid-20th century function as literary arbiter (certainly where Latin American writers are concerned, Madrid and Barcelona in the past 50 years have been far more central to diffusion than Paris or New York: e.g., the case of Chilean Roberto Bolaño). Would comparatists centered in French and English, please, for once wake up to the fact that the world is and has always been polycentric; and that what you know and do not know is not the measure of what is worth knowing about other cultures and literatures, it's just the measure of the greater or lesser extent of your personal ignorance and the blinkers of your professional (grad school) training. Casanova niftily dismisses the medieval and early modern Italian defenses of the vernacular and the consolidation of a vernacular literature in Italian on the questionable grounds that Italian was not backed by a large, centralizing state. But she has to ignore the early modern Spanish case because it simply cannot be dismissed (except by ignoring it): unlike the Italian case, there was a large, powerful, centralizing state behind it (indeed more powerful than the French till 1648); it antedated French defenses of the vernacular by anywere from 50 to 100 years (Nebrija's groundbreaking first grammar of a European vernacular, published 1492; Valdés's Defense of the [Castillian] language of the 1530s, widely circulated in Italy as well as Spain); and the emperor Charles V's dramatic and decisive use of Castillian, and his demand that Spain take diplomatic precedence before French, at the papal court in the 1530s. Indeed, Castillian was consolidated precociously as the vehicle for official historiography and the laws of the land already by the mid-13th century, as part of the remarkable cultural project of Alfonso X of Castille (with his court at Toledo). His politically motivated cultural project is a major precursor for what was accomplished by the Spanish and French monarchies in the 16th and 17th centuries, but itself looked to the example of the great Hispano-Muslim courts at Córdoba, Seville, Toledo, etc. for its effective recognition of the crucial links between political and cultural power (it also explains why Castillian was a vehicle for major literary texts well before Nebrija and the Spanish Golden Age). More importantly, there was the translation and deep influence of Spanish letters on French beginning at least as eaarly as La Celestina (1499) [whose translation went through over a dozen editions in 16th century France], the vogue for Spanish sentimental/epistolary novels of the 1490s through the 1550s, the Continent-wide success of the chivalric book Amadis de Gaula (from 1508), Antonio de Guevara's influence on Montaigne (Montaigne recognizes that Guevara was one of his father's favorite writers, in the original!), the diffusion of picaresque novels (which originated in Spain, beginning with Lazarillo in 1554), to say nothing of Cervantes and Don Quijote. The biggest erasure of Spain in Casanova's account, however, has to do with the Spanish classical theater's widely documented influence on the beginnings of French classical theater: as is well-known but not sufficiently appreciated, Corneille's Le Cid was an adaptation of Guillén de Castro's Mocedades del Cid and a reflection of course on the Spanish medieval epic hero; Corneille's Le menteur was an adaptation of Alarcón's wonderful play, La verdad sospechosa. Many other examples could be cited: Casanova focuses on the relation between Racine and Shakespeare because if she looks at Corneille and his generation she'd have to deal with the fact that the French classical theater in significant ways emerges out of its engagement with Spanish classical theater (as well as Italian commedia dell'arte, etc.). I'm less interested in turning tables here than in drawing attention to the fact that we need, once and for all, a comparatism that sheds its vestigially 19th century narratives and stops trying to do the work of nationalists and imperialists by promoting one or another tradition as origin, center, source vs. alleged "peripheries." A disciplinary imperialism has taken the place of the old politically motivated nationalist imperialisms: but there are more intelligent ways of defending your field and particular interests than by engaging in these knee-jerk, self-serving narratives (a true comparatism recognizes and enchances the distinctive greatness of all traditions, and recognizes a "center" wherever there is human creativity). All cultures draw on others and are shot through with borrowings and contradictions, now, in the recent and remote past, and for the foreseeable future. Moretti's work on the novel, in this sense, gives a much more useful, and much less tendentious bird's-eye view of the development of the novel (although even he has a tendency to reinforce the Chunnel myopia).

The book is interesting but repetitive. I agree with another reviewer who said that it could be shorter. Moreover, I think that it looks too much at the past just at a moment when, with the changes Internet is bringing about, the situation is changing very quickly. I did not have the feeling that I was reading about The World Republic of Letters as it is now but as it was some years ago.

Casanova's book probably reads better in the original French than in this lumbering translation. Nonetheless, in any language the book suffers from constant repetition of the same ideas. The book could easily have been one hundred pages shorter. Much of the discussion goes over old ground. The concluding chapter is not revelatory at all, but is worth pondering. Experienced readers might do well to skip directly to it.

The rise of geography in the social sciences has now officially entered the field of literary theory. I read this book as a person caught between different cultural and national identities and as a writer and artist caught between traditions and questions of how - and what - to represent. It was a thrilling read for me although not everyone, I suspect, will like the implications of this book. This isn't really the forum to go into them, but they are potentially revolutionary - and potentially liberating. Casanova's method draws heavily on the political sociology of Pierre Bourdieu and the historical sociology of Ferdinand Braudel. English-language fans of Immanuel Wallerstein and David Harvey will find fascinating correspondences. There are moments when I felt that she might be pushing her thesis too far, only to have my doubts dispelled within moments. 'The World Republic of Letters' is, I believe, the tip of the iceberg: these ideas will ripple out beyond literature into the broader cultural studies field. I hope many more people - especially writers who are, like me, baffled by the seeming bankruptcy of contemporay fiction - will engage with this book. It is only when we are stripped of our illusions and fantasies of what constitutes art and beauty that we shall be finally able to become true artists.

I have not read this book! However, since there's not much info here about it, thought I would refer interested parties to a review in the Jan.3 '05 issue of The Nation by Wm. Deresiewicz, which I quote from: "(this book) is almost certain to become quite famous among intellectuals around the world over the next few years"; and in summing up "the main thrust of Casanova's argument, which covers roughly the last century and a half, is unimpeachable. She has created a map of global literary power relations where none had existed, and she has raised a host of further questions." A very positive review.