La República mundial de las Letras

Convergences: Inventories of the Present

by Pascale Casanova

El país de la literatura no es la isla encantada de las formas puras, es un universo en continua transformación. La historia de la literatura universal que se propone aquí es la de los revolucionarios que consiguieron subvertir la ley literaria. La renovada lectura, bajo este prisma, de la obra de autores como Kafka, Joyce, Faulkner, Beckett, Ibsen, Cioran, Michaux y Juan Benet, entre otros, proporciona un arsenal crítico para todos aquellos que se revelan contra las evidencias y la arrogancia de los guardianes de la ley literaria.

Genres: Nonfiction, Theory, Criticism, Literary Criticism, History, France, Literature

475 pages, Hardcover

First published March 1, 1999

About the author

Pascale Casanova was a French literary critic. She was a Visiting Professor in the Department of Romance Studies at Duke University.

Reviews

[Roxana Chirilă · Rating 3 out of 5]

If you've ever wondered what the ivory tower of literature looks like and how it sees itself from the inside, this book is exactly what you need. "The World Republic of Letters" concerns itself with literary fiction, authors who end up in the canon of literature and the consecration of authors by higher critical instances.

This is not to say that Pascale Casanova looks down on popular fiction and/or genres - they simply aren't part of the scope of this book. They aren't even mentioned. (I'm not blaming, I'm explaining)

"The World Republic of Letters" is also an intensely, painfully French book. You can tell, because France is the first country to write in the vernacular (after Italy, which doesn't count), and it's always set the cultural tone, translated intensely, consecrated great authors such as Joyce or Faulkner. When other literary centers appeared, they set out to oppose France. If this book were called: "The World Republic of Letters: How France Has Set the Cultural Tone for the Past Few Centuries", it would be appropriate.

Because Paris is obviously the center of the literary universe, other literary traditions (such as, say, the Japanese and Chinese ones) are deemed to be isolated and not to count much. I'm sure the Japanese would be quite amused to hear that, considering their tradition, which is nothing to sneeze at.

So. I've mentioned what Pascale Casanova's book is not about (popular fiction; fiction not touched by France). Let's discuss what it is about.

When you have a great cultural center acknowledged by everyone as such, says Casanova, it tends to become a sort of Greenwhich meridian. It sets the tempo of culture, it decides what is modern and good, and what is not. Everyone else is turning towards it, to see what has been left behind and what is provincial. Authors in other literary zones can aspire towards it and try to copy it; or they might revolt against it in order to build their own, national literature; or they might come to the center because they are underappreciated in their native lands, and they might become consecrated there.

Not being a part of the center is a sort of tension which needs to be resolved, especially for authors in emerging literary zones - do they betray their people and become 'modern'? Do they try to do the politically right thing and build on the basis of their own literature?

Well, those who decide to become international rather than national meet in cultural centers (such as Paris, never forget Paris) and influence each other there. Their struggles are similar, so why wouldn't their solutions be?

It's an interesting book overall, especially if one is overly concerned with the politics of writing and ending up in the canon. It's somewhat stranger when you're on the outside of the ivory tower, looking in.

[Stephen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Somewhere in the world right now a woman has a great novel in her desk drawer or her computer. The only thing that separates her from a public audience is not recognition but "consecration", a term that's at the heart of Pascale Casanova's theory of world literature.

Let's assume this hypothetical woman's book known to no one becomes something we see people reading out in public, in parks and buses, on planes and the subway. With her public acceptance she is not necessarily being recognized for her talent, though thanks to the processes of consecration she believes that she is. Politically unsophisticated or willfully ignorant of the nature of politics, she thinks that the quality of writing alone is what sets a writer like herself apart. She believes in a meritocracy and fails to see the who and the why of what has consecrated her work.

Those writers whose great literary skills mask a political purpose Casanova concentrates on (the ones who are aware of why they are being consecrated), as she constructs a remarkably fluid, power-in-the-balance, philosophical image of the world of literature.

The economic centers of Paris, London and New York dominate world literature, but the great writers have done much more than gain consecration from these powerful plains. An American who reaches the global market with her book is not by nature cosmopolitan. She has done nothing more than take advantage of (and they her) the enormous amount of literary capital nearest at hand. Those like Joyce, Kafka and Faulkner wrote to invent new literary space so that they could steal away a home in the global landscape for their own people.

Every work from a dispossessed national space that aspires to the status of literature exists solely in relation to the consecrating authorities of the most autonomous places. It is only the romantic image of the artist's singularity - the fundamental element of literary mythology - that sustains the mistaken idea of creative solitude. In reality, the great heroes of literature invariably emerge only in association with the specific power of an autonomous and international literary capital. The case of James Joyce - rejected in Dublin, ignored in London, banned in New York, lionized in Paris - is undoubtedly the best example.
The literary world needs to be seen, then, as the product of antagonistic forces rather than as the result of a linear and gradually increasing tendency to autonomy.
For writers from nationalized spaces, exile is almost synonymous with autonomy. The great literary revolutionaries - Kis, Michaux, Beckett, and Joyce among them - find themselves so at odds with the norms of their native literary space and, by contrast, so at home with the norms current in the centers of international space that they are able to make their way only outside their homeland. It is in this sense that the three weapons that Joyce claimed as his own in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man(1916) are to be understood.

Those others like Flaubert, Proust and Woolf were well aware of how this process of the world republic of letters worked. The mysteries of their style isn't merely linguistic (i.e. craft above all) but also political. Sebald, Ferrante and Murnane are three writers who as of late are clearly writing with Casanova's theory of world literature in mind, doing for Germany, Italy and Australia what Kafka did for his Yiddish culture, Faulkner for his American South, and Joyce for his tiny island of Ireland - put their homes on the map outside of power, under their own terms.

From a literary critic from France who has just written a book called Kafka The Angry Poet I can't praise Casanova's book enough. It is one thing to enjoy a book, but it's something of a great gift to be shown why we read the books we do.

Lengthy excerpts included below for those interested about the various writers:
On Joyce:
The question of literary autonomy in Ireland was played out through a subversive use of language and of the national and social codes connected with it. Joyce condensed and, in his own fashion, settled the debate - inseparably literary, linguistic, and political - that pitted the proponents of Gaelic against those of English.
Joyce's dual opposition was spatial as well as literary: refusing to obey either the law of London or that of Dublin, he chose exile on the continent in order to produce an Irish literature. Ultimately it was in Paris, a politically neutral ground and an international literary capital, that he was to try to achieve this apparently contradictory result - thus placing himself in a position that was eccentric in the fullest sense of the word. Joyce settled in Paris, not in order to draw upon any models he might have found there, but to subvert the language of oppression itself. His purpose was therefore both literary and political.
The history of Irish literature was not finished with James Joyce. Through his claim to literary extraterritoriality he not only gave Irish literary space its contemporary form; he opened up a connection to Paris, thus providing a solution for all those who rejected the colonial alternative of retreat to Dublin or treasonous emigration to London... Yeats staked out the first national literary position in Dublin; in London, Shaw occupied the canonical position of the Irishman adapted to suit English requirements; Joyce, refusing to choose between these cities, succeeded in reconciling contraries by establishing Paris as a new stronghold for the Irish, ruling out both conformity to the standards of national poetry and submission to English literary norms.

On Faulkner:
Though he enjoys a great reputation in the highest circles of the literary world and ranks among the great literary revolutionaries, Faulkner is also a figure with whom all writers in countries on the periphery can identify - still more than Joyce, who has been annexed by critics in the centers and so thoroughly dehistoricized that deprived writers, bowing to the monopoly power of the capitals over literary consecration, tend to overlook the subversive dimension of his work. In putting an end to the curse of backwardness that lay over these regions, by offering the novelists of the poorest countries the possibility of giving acceptable literary form to the most repugnant realities of the margins of the world, Faulkner has been a formidable force for accelerating literary time.

On what prizes like The Booker Prize do:
But London has seldom imposed itself outside the linguistic jurisdiction of the British Empire (now Commonwealth). London publishers today publish very few literary translations, and prizes are awarded only to works written in English. It owes its credit to the vast extent of its linguistic area and to the globally dominant position now enjoyed by the English language; but because its power of consecration has always had a linguistic (and therefore often political) basis, its strictly literary credit is not of the same kind as that commanded by Paris.
In recent years the rivalry between London and New York has produced a very clear bipolarization of English-speaking cultural space. But if New York today is the unchallenged publishing capital of the world in financial terms, still it cannot be said to have become a center of consecration whose legitimacy is universally recognized. Here again the very question of legitimacy is one of the things at stake in the game, and the way it is answered depends on the place occupied by those who are prepared to wager on it. Many writers take advantage of this uncertain balance of power in order to play one capital off against the other.
Since 1981, for example, the Booker Prize, the most prestigious literary prize in Great Britain, has on several occasions been awarded to "not quites," as the Indian writer Bharati Mukherjee calls them - authors whose work has been shaped by immigration, exile, or postcolonization... This (multicultural umbrella) was all that was needed for the critics, confusing cause and effect, to deduce the existence of a "new" literature, even of a veritable literary movement originating in the former British colonial empire. In fact, there was a desire on the part of publishers to create the impression of a group by gathering together under a single label authors who had nothing, or very little, in common. This labeling effect (which may be compared, for example, with the promotion of the Latin American "boom" of the 1960s) turned out to be an extremely effective marketing strategy.
The programmed success of the novel by the Indian writer Vikram Seth, A Suitable Boy (1993), perfectly illustrates this phenomenon. Critics in both England and France described the book as an indubitable sign of the revitalization of literature in English, even of the "revenge" of the old colonies against the British Empire - and this despite the fact that the literary techniques employed were both typically English and largely outmoded. Indeed, the publisher proudly announced that the book was set in India in the 1950s and written "in the great tradition of Jane Austen and Dickens." In adopting the perennially popular form of the family saga and enlisting the aesthetic norms of the past century in the service of an eminently Western view of the world, the author (a graduate of Oxford and Stanford) showed his eagerness to satisfy all the most obvious criteria of the commercially successful novel. Far from furnishing evidence of some sort of literary liberation, or of the sudden accession of the formerly colonized to literary greatness, A Suitable Boy offered irrefutable proof of the virtually total domination of the English literary model over its cultural area.

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

American readers will probably react with hostility to this book, since Casanova is at her weakest when she talks about Anglophone literature, and her diatribes against literary critics are aimed at a French critical establishment which is lagging some 20 years behind the Anglophone one. It's also, for all its attempt to think globally, astonishingly Francocentric--a bias whose most distressing manifestation is the almost complete absence of women writers from the book and its account of literary modernity. (That account's general narrowness, which the last fifteen years of Anglophone scholarship have called into question, is also probably due to the nature of French literary culture right now.) Nonetheless as an attempt to formulate an empirically testable model of how international literature works and how writers, readers, and publishers participate in it, this is incredibly important work. It's certainly not up to Bourdieu's standard of sophistication, but his inspiration serves Casanova in good stead. (Side note: wish I'd had the time to read it in French. The translation reads fine, but the translator is incredibly hostile to Bourdieu, and actually adds footnotes saying she's taken out Casanova's Bourdieuean terminology. A real disservice to Casanova's serious effort to reconcile literary criticism and sociology of culture.)

[Mahdi Arabasadi مهدی عرب اسدی · Rating 4 out of 5]

در این زمینه یکی از بهترین هاست! فقط مراقب باشید، بعضی پیش فرضها خواسته ناخواسته به ذهن آدم قالب میشود بعد ازفصل‌های اول!

[Artin · Rating 4 out of 5]

نویسنده بودن راهی برای دیدن دنیاست، برای انسجام بخشیدن ب اطلاعاتی ک هر روزه با آن در تماسیم. بی شک کتاب ما را ب این نکته رهنمون می کند ک تا انسان غرق در کتاب نباشد خلاقیتش نمود پیدا نمی کند

[هشام العبيلي · Rating 2 out of 5]

العنوان المناسب للكتاب (الجمهورية الغربية للآداب)، إلا إذا كانت المؤلفة ترى أن العالمية تقتصر عليهم، لأنها لم تشمل بكتابها العرب والفرس والصينيين وغيرهم من القوميات، ترجمة الكتاب ليست بذلك الوضوح التام، لكنها تقرأ وتفهم على مهل، في الكتاب فوائد منثورة، لكني لم أخرج من جملته بتصور أو فكرة غيرت ما لدي، نعم هناك فوائد لا بأس بها، من مثل عواصم الأدب، وتأثيرها في البلدان البعيدة التي تتحدث لغة عاصمة الأدب، وكذلك تأثير جائزة نوبل في الالتفات لأدب قطر ما، وما العوامل المساعدة في إيجاد عاصمة أدبية، وإن كانت عواصم كل منها يتبنى لغة يكتب من خلالها أدباؤها.

[Victoria · Rating 1 out of 5]

I love when I hate a book so much that I go out of my way to find reviews that tear it to pieces and I just sit there rubbing my hands like a sassy evil villain, mumbling "yasss, yassss."

[Tom Leland · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had no business reading this book, as evidenced by this passage on page 60: "The first great codifier of the (French) language and of poetry was, of course, Francois de Malherbe." But of COURSE!

I was in over my head for most of it. With a great deal of work (like, say, spending 10 minutes per page looking up words and references, and just figuring out what the hell she meant), I could've gleaned much more from the book. But its focus, well stated by another reviewer: "an attempt to formulate an empirically testable model of how international literature works and how writers, readers, and publishers participate in it" -- just didn't interest me that much.

I do have great heart for one of the key premises of the work, as in where Pascale says "...(literary) criticism, in the fullness of its ignorance, projects its own aesthetic categories upon texts whose history is much more complex than it is willing to acknowledge."

I learned a lot about Joyce, Beckett, Kafka and others, but in the end I (and I'd say 99.9% of all book readers) simply read for the enjoyment of a good story, or for interesting information. I'm not so very curious about the role Joyce's works played in breaking Ireland away from English domination, or for establishing new pathways for fiction writing -- though of course I have great appreciation for the import of such analysis.

While I was barely comprehending much of the work as I went along, I couldn't help but notice that it was quite repetitive -- she seemed to make the same point a hundred times.

[Constantin]

did I read this just so I could flex quote it on an exam for bonus points? yeah

[Braaaaais · Rating 2 out of 5]

Luego escribo algo más elaborado pero un poco bluff

[Hagar · Rating 2 out of 5]

I've got the arabic translation of this book..! The style of writing was really sophisticated and difficult to grasp at times, that always needed a re-reading! (still I'd like to own the English translation of the book)!

The Book evolves about one idea and derives many examples from the history of world literarture..which could be illustrative at times, and need to be skipped all of the time!

However, loved her metaphors of the introduction and conclusion chapters!

A necessary book for those interested in framing a manifesto of the theoretical part of Comparative Literature and World Literature!

[Carlo · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book, building literary theory via Bourdieu and Braudel, is a page-turner. Dominant literary languages: Why Latin? Why French? Faulkner and Garcia Marquez to us via Paris. The role of Barcelona for Latin American literature. Ngugi wa Thiong'o moves from English to Kikuyu. The importance of Dante and Vico for Joyce and Beckett. Translation! A must read for those who love the modernists...

[Chad Post · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is fine. Just fine. There are a few interesting concepts and ideas, but jesus christ is it really repetitive. And in the end, maybe not as useful and it aims to be. But still, it's fine. Totally fine.

[Stas · Rating 2 out of 5]

boring. some fun facts, but only occasionally. Offers platitudes as some new discoveries.

[Marthe · Rating 4 out of 5]

Franse versie gelezen, vlotte schrijfstijl en alles wordt duidelijk uitgelegd

[محمد نجابتی · Rating 1 out of 5]

کتابی بسیار کلیشه ای!

[Purple Iris · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm glad I read this. I've seen it cited a lot and I was curious as to how one might imagine a "world republic of letters." There are many interesting ideas in the book, many good ideas. A lot of just common sense. However, overall, I was pretty underwhelmed and often infuriated when reading this.

In the preface to the 2008 edition, Casanova states: "la circulation transnationale du livre m'a aussi renvoyée à maintes reprises à une identité que je n'avais eu cesse d'occulter ou de dénier en ce que je la considérais comme dénuée d'importance, de validité ou de pertinence: mon identité nationale" (xiv). I find it pretty stunning that she could think her nationality, her positionality would be irrelevant in a book about authors' positioning vis-à-vis global literary institutions. She goes on to say that "mes interlocuteurs étrangers ne cessaient pourtant de souligner ce fait comme partie intégrante de mon projet" (xiv) because of course it is . It would be interesting to see how this book might have read if Casanova had written it after her encounter with these foreign readers. I suspect it would have been much better.

My biggest frustration with this book was the blatant eurocentrism. All that is standard, universal and modern comes from Europe. The rest of the world is trying to catch up to what she calls the "méridien de Greenwich" of literature. All literatures not from Western Europe are deemed as small, emerging, new, etc. Never mind that several of them go back for centuries. She tries to explain this away by saying that Japanese literature, for example, was turned in on itself for centuries and not part of the international market, so can now be considered part of these newer literary traditions. I am not buying that. I have no problem with Europeans being primarily considered with European literature, and basically ignoring traditions based in Asia, Africa or the Americas. I do find it problematic to frame reading and critical choices as being somehow due to other literatures not yet being modern or universal or some other bullshit. I mostly read literature from my neck of the woods or written by people who look and live a lot like me. I know that's a choice, though, and has nothing to do with the quality of works written by other people in other places. Seems pretty obvious.

Debjani Ganguly has a good review of this book. I'd be interested in reading others. I find it highly problematic that so many people are fawning over this book, without calling attention to its biases.

[Yigru Zeltil · Rating 5 out of 5]

Alături de „Regulile artei”, tomul lui P. Bourdieu, constituie un reper în materie de sociologie literară; cele două cărți sunt imposibil de evitat în cazul în care cauți să înțelegi de ce Franța a avut un prestigiu literar atât de formidabil și care au fost strategiile folosite de către scriitori din diferite colțuri ale lumii aflați în diferite situații și contexte (uneori, aceștia au căutat să se sustragă națiunilor tinere din care proveneau pentru a se consacra la „centru”; alteori, și-au făcut un loc în literaturile mai mici, de pildă, importând mode literare).

[ChenE · Rating 3 out of 5]

This copy implies how the inter-national literatures transact and refresh the current system. But the idea is scattered in the book while I have to use your own logic to make them as a whole, as well as trying to understand the background of these ideas, especially in the Europe literature atmosphere. Maybe the original edition will reveal more clues, I hope:)

[书迪 Shudi YANG · Rating 4 out of 5]

做斯拉夫的好处是对世界文学三巨头有天然的怀疑，但我也相信在讨论中就有学术生命。C的理论建构完成度很高，以至于对论点细节的商榷变成一件相当建设性的事情。很明显的一个争议在于C无法设想边缘的生产性：必须等到第二代边缘作家同时break away中心和民族局限才能绕开中心获得更现代的普遍性。隐含a. 新自治的内容是incomprehension，b. 第一代重演du Bellay的民族建构只能被献祭。不过我并不认为“莎通过法译本在传播”这样的实证描述本身有可破防之处，此外“做不了内文本阐述”的批评也略外部——整个内部批评传统已经作为互补的理论对手嵌在论证的互文关系中。最���尽管c表面上是潮流的空间化，实际上是进一步看到时间。中间与边缘的关系是偶然的，先发和后发的关系才是根本的。这是一个很漂亮的还原。

[Andreea H · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found the subject really interesting, but the explanations can get pretty exhaustive at times.

[Helena]

casanova nemnde nynorsk nokre gongar, men ho påstod at det er eit språk folk snakker, og det er ikkje sant, for nynorsk (og bokmål) er skriftlege språk, plis

[Hosein Naseri · Rating 5 out of 5]

بررسی‌ای عمیق و موشکافانه که می‌تواند مباحث بسیار گسترده‌ای را در باب زبان و ادبیات و همچنین مسئله تطبیق را باز کند.

[Anouk Vanhorenbeek · Rating 4 out of 5]

Behandeld in het vak 'literatuur in vergelijkend perspectief'. Enorm interessant, maar helaas niet volledig doorgeraakt. In de toekomst zeker eens herlezen!

[Avery · Rating 2 out of 5]

Could not stand the author’s voice

[Jordan Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm writing about this book as part of a larger project, so I'll refrain from engaging too closely here, but this volume is (obviously) a pivotal book in system-based theories of world literature and an important argument for mapping how power works in the production of literature.

It has some limitations, but overall, a cornerstone read for comparative literature or world literature beginners.

[Kavita · Rating 4 out of 5]

Something tells me Kundera read this recently

[Katarzyna Bartoszynska · Rating 3 out of 5]

Really fascinating theory of literary capital. The actual analyses of texts, however, are quite weak.

[Kathy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Can't explain world literature in pre-modern times. Another model?

[Rodrigo · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of my favorite pieces of literary criticism albeit its shortcomings.