What Is World Literature?

by David Damrosch

World literature was long defined in North America as an established canon of European masterpieces, but an emerging global perspective has challenged both this European focus and the very category of "the masterpiece." The first book to look broadly at the contemporary scope and purposes of world literature, What Is World Literature? probes the uses and abuses of world literature in a rapidly changing world.

In case studies ranging from the Sumerians to the Aztecs and from medieval mysticism to postmodern metafiction, David Damrosch looks at the ways works change as they move from national to global contexts. Presenting world literature not as a canon of texts but as a mode of circulation and of reading, Damrosch argues that world literature is work that gains in translation. When it is effectively presented, a work of world literature moves into an elliptical space created between the source and receiving cultures, shaped by both but circumscribed by neither alone. Established classics and new discoveries alike participate in this mode of circulation, but they can be seriously mishandled in the process. From the rediscovered Epic of Gilgamesh in the nineteenth century to Rigoberta Menchú's writing today, foreign works have often been distorted by the immediate needs of their own editors and translators.

Eloquently written, argued largely by example, and replete with insightful close readings, this book is both an essay in definition and a series of cautionary tales.

Genres: Nonfiction, Literary Criticism, Literature, World Literature, Theory, Academic

344 pages, Paperback

First published March 10, 2003

About the author

A past president of the American Comparative Literature Association, David Damrosch has written widely on comparative and world literature from antiquity to the present. His books include The Narrative Covenant: Transformations of Genre in the Growth of Biblical Literature (1987), We Scholars: Changing the Culture of the University (1995), What Is World Literature? (2003), The Buried Book: The Loss and Rediscovery of the Great Epic of Gilgamesh (2007), and How to Read World Literature (2008). He is the founding general editor of the six-volume Longman Anthology of World Literature (2004) and the editor of Teaching World Literature (2009) and co-editor of The Princeton Sourcebook in Comparative Literature (2009), The Routledge Companion to World Literature (2011), and Xin fangxiang: bijiao wenxue yu shijie wenxue duben [New Directions: A Reader of Comparative and World Literature], Peking U. P., 2010. He is presently completing a book entitled Comparing the Literatures: What Every Comparatist Needs to Know, and starting a book on the role of global scripts in the formation of national literatures.

Reviews

[Chanté · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am actually going to give this text four stars for its readability. I spent my entire weekend reading it and actually feel like I understand the dilemmas that the comparitists face in the world of literature. I am still wrapping my brain around some of the concepts, overall it made for a truly educational read. The text actually touched on many, if not most, of the issues that I have contemplated as of late.... Not recommended for the non-theory, non-literary nerd types.

[Manuel Espinoza Proudinat · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reading this book was just so entertaining and enriching. Although some passages ramble a little, the books succeeds in giving an encompassing enough account of the dilemmas of current comparativism and the complex composition of literary canons through space and time, a process that requires the intervention of individuals as well as the involvement of casual circumstances in history, local literary production cultures and the exchange dynamics between these and the world beyond their frontiers. It was indeed very refreshing to read something by an American scholar that tries to understand and appreciate the value of the literatures of the world in a time when the official discourse of the USA doesn't get very far from racism and xenophobia. The chapters on the translations twists and turns of Mechthild von Magdeburg and the discovery, philological processing, and (failed) translations of the tables on which the parts of the Epic of Gilgamesh was written are exhilarating. What Is World Literature? should be considered a required reading for anyone interested on the subject.

[Atefe Dtr · Rating 3 out of 5]

دمراش کلاً تو حوزه‌ی ادبیات تطبیقی کار می‌کنه و اغلب کتاباش به فارسی ترجمه شده که «ادبیات جهان چیست» به نوعی گزیده‌ایه از چند کتابش مثل «ادبیات جهان را چگونه بخوانیم» و «کتاب مدفون».
تو این کتاب از موضوعات جالبی صحبت می‌کنه. اول یکم از ادبیات جهان، جهان‌وطنی، گوته و اکرمان می‌گه، اینکه اولین بار گوته از اصطلاح ادبیات جهان در معنای امروزش استفاده کرد. بعد می‌ره سراغ یه شعر از رابرت هریک و تصویر گل رز در شعرش رو در اشعار دیگه پیدا می‌کنه، از شعرهای هوراس گرفته تا کولریج و رنسار و به این نتیجه می‌رسه که این شاعران از «رز به شکل ایماژی جاودان در اشاره به کوتاهی زمان» استفاده کردن.

در ادامه هم از ترجمه‌های هزارویک شب، نحوه‌ی کشف گیلگمش مفصلاً صحبت می‌کنه. فصل آخرش (گیلگمش صدام) برام جالب بود، اونجا از صدام و اشتیاقش به نوشتن بحث می‌کنه و اینکه خودش رو با گیلگمش یکی می‌دونسته. بعد هم یکی از آثارش رو (که من نمی‌دونستم اثری هم داره) با یکی از کارای فیلیپ راث مختصراً مقایسه می‌کنه که این توضیحاتشم جالب بود.
دیدگاه اصلی خودش اینه که فرهنگ‌ها و تمدن‌ها جدا از هم نیستند، هرچند که نظریه‌پردازان و منتقدان زیادی تمایل به تقابل‌سازی و جداانگاری دارن و به تناسب این دیدگاهش می‌ره سراغ آثار کهنی مثل گیلگمش و هزارویک شب. «گیلگمش و ایلیاد، کتاب مقدس و قرآن محصول تمدن‌های منفصل و همیشه مخالف نیستند؛ آن‌ها متقابلاً محصول طبیعی با منشأ فرهنگی غنی آسیای غربی و مدیترانه‌ی شرقی‌اند. اسحاق و اسماعیل برادر ناتننی‌اند و اتنا پیشتم و نوح به هم نزدیک‌اند؛ آن‌ها دو نسخه از یک و همان شخصیت هستند» (186).
به طور کلی، کتاب بیشتر ساختاری گزارشی داره تا تحلیلی ولی در نهایت روایت منسجمی رو ساخته. به نظرم برای آشنایی با ادبیات تطبیقی، کتاب مقدماتی خوبیه.

[Sigo Paolini · Rating 2 out of 5]

Problem with the book appears in the beginning. He asks What is a Novel and then talks about the Tale of Genji, a series of Japanese poems written in the 13th century, and totally neglects DQ written in the 17th and considered the first novel. From there he skirts around the world cherry picking stories, bits of poesy, lines from essays, books and whatnot in a dizzying speed but again never cohesively putting it together in some semblance of relevance. Maybe for Damrosch there isn't any.Pity that. It was good reading a synopsis of Monkey and Journey to the West, two books I read years ago and liked, but they were presented more of a pastiche of various tales than part of the large oeuvre of literature.

[Plaridel · Rating 4 out of 5]

david, i want u to kno dat i read this and thought you were dead. also i've been having to research about genji and i've been watch this guy converse with experts and completely ignored any kind of credits. fast forward to a month later, i was curious of what u look like and i realized you were the guy conversing about genji and YOU'RE NOT DEAD. i am an idiot. also, i treat academic people like celebrities (i hate them or i love them). u the man.


I would like to say that this book (is it a book? idk i forgot and im lazy to search. i wanna write this goodreads post and call it a day) was a good one. I liked it and now you have a permanent place in my heart.

[Blair · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent book. I have a particular interest in World Literature as I'm teaching a course in it at high school. This is pitched at a higher level from Harvard professor Damrosch, but I will definitely use sections of it with my students. Damrosch is a polymath and an elegant writer. This is full of insights.

[Ananya · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting. First few chapters and conclusion are well worth the read.

[Catarina Caçoete · Rating 3 out of 5]

até percebo a cena dele

[Revanth Ukkalam · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a riveting read!

[Esra · Rating 3 out of 5]

from Goethe to Said, good work to summarize relation between world literature, great piece on Rigoberta Menchu

[Melvyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

“World literature is not an immense body of material that must somehow, impossibly, be mastered; it is a mode of reading that can be experienced intensively with
a few works just as effectively as it can be explored extensively with a large number.”

An enjoyable raconteurish style that keeps you going through rambling accounts of great works from around the world even if you cannot clearly see the direction you are taking.

A lot of these stories behind the stories have a wry twist to them: how the Dictionary of the Khazars revealed a covert nationalist subtext missed by most international critics; how Mechthild von Magdeburg’s lusty original was obscured by her genteel translators; how ancient Egyptian poetry was overdomesticated by its translators; how Kafka’s Castle cunningly misled his readers even before the translators got near it; and how Rigoberta Menchu was misrepresented by her translator and editor, but came out smiling anyway.

“World literature is writing that gains in translation” concludes Damrosch, but sometimes that gain is much more than we expect.

“World literature is thus always as much about the host culture's values and needs as it is about a work's source culture; hence it is a double refraction, one that can be described through the figure of the ellipse, with the source and host cultures providing the two foci that generate
the elliptical space within which the work lives as world literature, connected to both cultures, circumscribed by neither alone.”

“Translation can never really succeed if a work's meaning is taken to reside essentially in the local verbal texture of its original phrasing.”

“As Wolfgang Iser argued in The Act of Reading, literary narratives work less by communicating fixed information than by creating suggestive gaps that the reader must fill in.”

“George Steiner argued in After Babel that human societies have multiplied languages not so much to communicate as to conceal their secrets and maintain their individual identities against the surrounding world: I am suggesting that the outwardly communicative, extrovert
thrust of language is secondary. . . . The primary drive is inward and domestic. Each tongue hoards the resources of consciousness, the world pictures of the clan. . . . a language builds a wall
around its “middle kingdom" of the group's identity. lt is secret towards the outsider and inventive of its own world.

Steiner's approach involves a politics as well as a hermeneutics. In his theory the work of art becomes a stand-in for the individual who stubbornly resists the seductions of sociability: There can hardly be an awakened human being who has not, at some moment, been exasperated by the "publicity" of language, who has not experienced an almost bodily discomfort at the disparity between the uniqueness, the novelty of his own emotions and the worn coinage of words. It is almost intolerable that needs, affections, hatreds,, introspections which we feel to be
overwhelmingly our own, which shape our awareness of identity and the world, should have to be voiced-even and most absurdly when we speak to ourselves-in the vulgate. Intimate, unprecedented as is our thirst, the cup has long been on other lips.

Steiner goes so far as to see this realization as a psychic trauma we encounter early in life: "One can only conjecture," he soberly concludes, as to the blow which this discovery must be to the child's psyche" (Steiner here echoes Jacques Lacan in seeing language as a form of crystallized alienation,)

Anyone involved in translating or teaching works from other cultures must always weigh how much cultural information is needed and how it should be presented.

“At a minimum, it takes three points to defìne a plane surface, and perhaps three works, interestingly juxtaposed and studied with care, can defìne a literary fìeld. Antigone, Shakuntala, and Twelfth Night can together open up a world of dramatic possibility.”

“Works of world literature interact in a charged field defined by a fluid and multiple set of possibilities of juxtaposition and combination.”

[Anne · Rating 3 out of 5]

some good axiomatic parts in the Intro, and repeats in later chapters--esp. on Kafka and Rigoberta Menchu. Also, dealing with the realism of encountering more than we understand (or can read) is refreshing. Hard to draw paradigms, though, from his use of scholarship to support readings (e.g. in the Menchu part), or get a grip on how he sees genre as a force, which it seems to be. A lot of the chapters end cryptically, aphoristically. Hard to come up with a way, beyond summarizing and extracting, to convey the useful parts to a readership (e.g. in Japan) with a very different world and "world," as a model for a book or long-type essay...also, reluctance to accept/seek info from non-academics (but for fiction-writers) is a bit of a minus, in the world we live in...I sense anthologizing rather than paradigmizing...but his open search for (I think) collaborators is also refreshing, in being upfront about that dependence.