Historicizing a concept

Theories of world literature may be the best source of a concept of global literature that we have at our disposal. The problem is that they disagree about almost everything. To begin with, there is the disparity between Goethe’s praise and Marx and Engels’ critique. Goethe’s praise of world literature is so enthusiastic that it, paradoxically, produces its own downside as the only critical aspect of world literature: at one point, there is simply too much of this good thing, Weltliteratur: ‘the world literature I have called for is deluging and threatening to drown me like the sorcerer’s apprentice: Scotland and France pour forth almost daily, and in Milan they are publishing a most important daily paper called l’Eco’. ^{Footnote 14} As Goethe’s geographical references imply, his world literature is quite often simply European literature (‘European, in other words, World Literature’). ^{Footnote 15} This adds to the disparity from the beginnings of world literature studies (when Goethe would praise what Marx and Engels would criticize) a marked difference between Goethe’s part in these beginnings and one of the most recent stages, when Etiemble was one of the first to protest that we no longer have the right to derive world literature from Europe. ^{Footnote 16}

But besides the rifts between the conservative and the progressive parts of German Romanticism, or those between Romanticism and, for instance, the kind of mid-twentieth-century Maoism that had informed Etiemble, there is also no lack of disparities within the era in which Etiemble was writing. The greatest of these differences, at least in terms of biography, must be the incredible gulf between, on the one hand, Curtius writing a post-war classic of world literature studies after taking the post of Leo Spitzer, a Jewish faculty member of the University of Cologne denounced in 1933, and, on the other hand, Auerbach, a Jewish pioneer like Spitzer of German comparative literary studies, writing a very similar classic after being invited by Spitzer himself to a position at the neutral University of Istanbul in 1936. ^{Footnote 17} In other words, both the man who occupied the chair emptied by Spitzer’s flight from the Nazis and the man for whom Spitzer secured a chair on his flight from the Nazis went on to write classics of comparative literature, both of which were translated in the post-war lingua franca and published in a prestigious series at Princeton as early as 1953.

As for more conceptual differences, few are as pronounced as the dispute between close reading and distant reading, which has brought with it even the difference between talking, like Moretti, about metropolitan centres and global peripheries, on the one hand, and, on the other, redefining these two antagonistic notions as non-antagonistic hosts and guests, as Francesca Orsini does in her response to Moretti’s plea for distant reading. ^{Footnote 18} With the ongoing rise of digital humanities, this dispute over close reading and distant reading has been reframed in technological terms, where Moretti’s initiative to quantify the archive of world literature has received many more followers than his initial distant reading, but also many more critics – beginning with such influential figures of the renewed world literature studies as Emily Apter, the author of the book Against world literature.Footnote ¹⁹

Many of the disagreements have to do with that between translatability and untranslatability. This is the antinomy separating, on the one hand, the position that ‘the world literature [Weltliteratur] of the future, that is to say literature, will merit, even more than does the Weltliteratur of which Goethe dreamed, Mr. Árpád Berczik’s reproach that it largely depends upon translations’ (because one should ‘read Saikaku in translation rather than Péladan in the original’); ^{Footnote 20} and, on the other hand, the view that world literature cannot rely on translations and should in effect be reduced to comparative literature (as in Hugo Meltzl’s infamous ‘Dekaglottismus’ of German, French, English, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Icelandic, and Hungarian ^{Footnote 21} ), if not in many ways aborted (as in Against world literature’s ‘speed bumps of untranslatability’). ^{Footnote 22}

This leads to what can only be the final dispute between theories of world literature: is world literature something to be for, or something to be against? Is it something that ‘everybody must endeavor to hasten’, as Goethe did in the early days, ^{Footnote 23} or instead something that by now can trigger only the kind of uneasiness that Apter expressed recently ‘in the face of the entrepreneurial, bulimic drive to anthologize and curricularize the world’s cultural resources, as evinced in projects sponsored by some proponents of World Literature’? ^{Footnote 24}

But there is one thing that theories of world literature do agree upon almost universally, albeit (if not because) unwittingly. They almost without exception do whatever they do while commenting on the global, or nearly global, conditions of their own positions of enunciation. In fact, theories of world literature tend to theorize world literature precisely in response to what they perceive as an imminent or ongoing global event.

To give a first example, one whose otherworldly optimism may seem at odds with the examples that follow. In his 1907 essay on world literature, the future Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore elevated ‘comparative literature’, the English term he was invited to address, to the status of a collectivity of letters, as Spivak noted recently.^{Footnote 25} So, whereas most of the examples that follow are concerned with some kind of global crisis while commenting on world literature in terms of Weltliteratur, world(-)literature, or littérature-monde, Tagore chose to devote his essay on ‘comparative literature’ to world literature in the sense of a collectivity of letters, ‘Visva Sahitya’.^{Footnote 26} This level of argument enabled him to express unprecedented optimism about worldly matters, optimism that he would be able to stay true to up until the years preceding the Second World War.^{Footnote 27} And yet, towards the end of Tagore’s essay, the characteristic philosophical style of passages like

is interrupted by this nugget of both literary and political critique:

If this criticism seems rather mild, it is only because it comes from a speech that is indeed much more optimistic and elevated than what people usually have to say about world literature. And this is despite the fact that those who will have something to say in what follows, while not being acknowledged by the Nobel Committee like Tagore, nonetheless include hyper-canonized writers (from Goethe to Gorky), globally influential political figures (from Marx to Sarkozy), and world-renowned humanities scholars (from Auerbach to the likes of Spivak, Jameson, Said, and Moretti). The few who remain are some of the main figures in world literature studies (from Brandes, Curtius, and Strich to Casanova, Damrosch, and Apter), most of whom also rank among the key names in literary studies in general. Finally, as the Weltliteratur that Marx metonymized in his manifesto is echoed in the littérature-monde that Sarkozy reacted against with his own manifesto, the piece that caught Sarkozy’s attention was signed by no fewer than forty-four superstars of contemporary Francophone literature. The exercise in name-dropping that therefore inevitably follows will be overshadowed, and hopefully explained, only by the magnitude of the inter- and extra-textual matters that converge in these names: the matter of global literature and the matter of global crisis.

From Weltliteratur to world literature

As mentioned above, the proximity of global events and key developments in the discussion of world literature – far from being limited to the co-existence of the global spread of the notion of globalization, on the one hand, and the emergence of the notion of global literature, on the other – goes back at least to the global event of the bourgeois revolutions and its impact on Marx and Engels’ comment on Weltliteratur. Just a year before the bourgeois revolutions of 1848, the first of only two ‘world revolutions’ according to Giovanni Arrighi, Terence K. Hopkins, and Immanuel Wallerstein,^{Footnote 30} Marx and Engels took the Goethean metaphor of Weltliteratur and turned it into a metonymy, a link (even the final link) in a long metonymical chain of world-historic processes. Instead of simply metaphorically likening world literature to the world market as Goethe had done, they saw both as parts of the same bourgeois society and its crisis-ridden mode of production. The result was a literalization of Goethe’s metaphor, a gesture that Pheng Cheah pointed out recently, if only to criticize it – and the contemporary theories of world literature that repeat it – for reducing the unmappable world of phenomenologists to the mappable globe of geographers.^{Footnote 31}

Here is the paragraph, with both the famous Goethean metaphor and the much less well-known string of global processes that ties the metaphor down to the literal level:

The string of metonymies of globalization begins with ‘old-established national industries have been destroyed’; the final metonymy, literalizing Goethe’s metaphor, declares that ‘from numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature’. In between, we find ‘And as in material, so also in intellectual production’, which suggests that the two should be read together to imply that what has been destroyed are not just old-established national industries but also old-established national literatures.Footnote ³³ That is something hardly imaginable to Goethe only two decades earlier, when he saw in world literature not a product of capitalist destruction, but an epoch whose coming ‘everybody must endeavor to hasten’.

This is how Marx and Engels updated Goethe’s Weltliteratur for the world revolutions of 1848. In that year, however, Goethe’s Weltliteratur entered not only the Communist manifesto, but also, much less famously, the title of Johannes Scherr’s three-volume anthology of literature worldwide, Bildersaal der Weltliteratur (Gallery of world literature). Written ‘in a time that had no time for the beautiful because it was completely used up by half-revolutions and full-reactions’, as Scherr would note in 1885 to introduce the third edition,^{Footnote 34} this 1848–49 anthology was, according to Scherr’s 1869 introduction to the second edition, ‘the first attempt to materialize a thought which Goethe was the first to name – “world literature” (“Weltliteratur”)’.^{Footnote 35}

This rash attribution of the term to Goethe was repeated exactly thirty years later, in 1899, by Georg Brandes, the Danish critic who famously introduced Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche to Europe. As if to measure the global impact of Scherr’s ‘half-revolutions and full-reactions’ from half a century back, Brandes closed his German-language essay on Weltliteratur by warning against the ‘jealous national sentiment’ that had caused Goethean cosmopolitanism ‘to recede almost everywhere’^{Footnote 36} – a fear previously expressed in quite similar terms (the ‘unhealthy “national principle”’) by Meltzl in his introduction to the first issue of the first journal of comparative literature, Acta Comparationis Litterarum Universarum (1877–88).^{Footnote 37}

Precisely twenty years after Brandes’ ‘Weltliteratur’, writing in the aftermath of a world war and a communist revolution, Maxim Gorky in effect measured the outcome of Brandes’ worldwide ‘jealous national sentiment’ in his own brief yet strategic essay on world literature. The essay introduced the plan to translate 1,500 masterpieces of world literature written between the French and Russian revolutions, a centrally planned project whose scope the founder of socialist realism praised as ‘the first and sole one in Europe’:

Another thirty years later, in 1949, in the aftermath of yet another world war and yet another communist revolution, that revolution entrusted its central Literary Research Institute to Zheng Zhenduo, who had helped start the May Fourth Movement in Beijing the year that Gorky’s brief essay appeared and who soon went on to use another Gorky piece as the main reference of his own essay on world literature.^{Footnote 39}

Still in 1949 but back in Goethe’s Germany, Ernst Robert Curtius said the following about Goethe’s legacy in a talk that he later appended to European literature and the Latin Middle Ages, the English edition of his classic work of post-war comparative literature from 1948:

Three years before Curtius’ talk, his compatriot Fritz Strich published a book on Goethe and Weltliteratur. In his ‘Preface’, Strich traced the conception of his pioneering study back to a series of lectures he had given in London immediately after the First World War with the aim to use ‘his special knowledge in the cause of better international understanding’.^{Footnote 41} This cause seemed all but lost by 1932, when Strich gave a lecture in Weimar on the centenary of Goethe’s death, as ‘even then, even in Weimar, ominous signs were to be seen’ of the catastrophe that soon thereafter ‘broke upon the world’ and ‘Everything that Goethe had proclaimed as the aim of world literature fell in ruins; and it was his own people that had brought this upon the human Race!’ After that it seemed to Strich ‘pointless to attempt to drown the discords and the thunder of the cannon with Goethe’s voice’, until the end of the Second World War brought about ‘a moment in world history when everything [could] be lost or everything won’.^{Footnote 42} At that point he decided, nonetheless, to publish a book on Goethe that ‘deals exclusively with matters of scholarship and history, and yet is not intended to be a work of scholarship for its own sake’,^{Footnote 43} or, as he would say in 1957 to introduce the second edition of the book, ‘a strictly scholarly work in itself’ to which he wanted to give ‘a mediatory, reconciliatory purpose in a horribly torn time and world’.^{Footnote 44}

Three years after Curtius’ talk, his farewell to Goethe’s age was echoed by Erich Auerbach, the author of yet another German classic of post-war comparative literature studies, the 1946 book Mimesis. In his 1952 essay on the philology of Weltliteratur, Auerbach assessed the post-war conjuncture as one of standardization and went on to say that

In Auerbach’s age of standardization, the Weltliteratur of Scherr, Meltzl, Brandes, Curtius, Strich, and even Auerbach himself had to make way for the world literature of North American comparative literature departments.Footnote ⁴⁶ It is no surprise, then, that even Harold Bloom, who to this day stubbornly defends the kind of western Eurocentric humanism embodied by Auerbach or Curtius, felt the need to distance his epoch from Goethe’s in his own classic comparative study, the 1994 tome The Western canon, in which he stated that, within that canon, ‘Goethe now seems the least available to our sensibility’, and suggested that ‘this distance has little to do with how badly his poetry translates into English’, insofar as ‘a poet and wisdom writer who is his language’s equivalent of Dante can transcend inadequate translation but not changes in life and literature that render his central attitudes so remote from us as to seem archaic’.^{Footnote 47}

From world literature to world-literature

As mentioned above, the Spring of Nations in 1848 was the first of two ‘world revolutions’ according to Arrighi, Hopkins, and Wallerstein. May ’68 was the other one. Just as 1848 was a failed but world-scale return to the French Revolution, so too 1968 was a failed but world-scale return to the Russian Revolution; and just as 1848 succeeded in institutionalizing the original Left as a rehearsal for the Russian Revolution, so too 1968 managed to institutionalize the New Left as a rehearsal for the fall of the Berlin Wall.^{Footnote 48} Wallerstein, the surviving co-author of this thesis from 1989, reiterated his position on May 1968 as recently as 2010, when he wrote that the ‘Revolutionaries … attacked the role of the Soviet Union, which they saw as a collusive participant in US hegemony.’^{Footnote 49}

This kind of 1968 critique of the Warsaw Pact as well as of NATO is preserved both in content and in style in a 1974 book written by René Etiemble against the Eurocentrism of ‘a Europe flouted, crossed out by the imperial greediness of the Pentagon in its alliance with the Russians’.^{Footnote 50} This echo of May ’68 in a comparative literature book from 1974 is even more remarkable given the fact that Etiemble was no 1968er; quite the contrary: introducing the third edition in 1975, the lapsed Maoist from the Sorbonne even accused the ‘intellectual Left’ of denying ‘the biological nature of the human species’ and thus somehow ‘preparing the ground for Hitler’s babies’.^{Footnote 51} It was then not as a leftist but as a much more abstract humanist that Etiemble placed at the beginning of the book, even before the first numbered section, his critique of the Eurocentrism of Weltliteratur, a paper that he had already presented at the International Comparative Literature Association in 1964 and published in the proceedings in 1966,^{Footnote 52} the year that the revolution of 1968 actually started according Wallerstein.^{Footnote 53}

Writing in 1992 with Arrighi and Hopkins, Wallerstein also saw 1968 as ‘the harbinger of 1989’, the year that the fall of the Berlin Wall symbolized the spread of post-industrialization from the capitalist West to the socialist East.^{Footnote 54} This spread of capitalism entered discussions about literature and globalization in 1986, when Fredric Jameson accompanied his famous critique of postmodernism with an essay pleading, ‘In these last years of the century’, for ‘the reinvention … of what Goethe long ago theorized as “world literature”’.^{Footnote 55} For the pioneering Marxist critic of Western postmodernism this demanded ‘some specific engagement with the question of third-world literature’,^{Footnote 56} which he went on to conceptualize as the literature of national allegories, narratives whose protagonists incarnate the histories of their respective nations. Jameson saw the national allegory as a politically emancipatory narrative device regrettably absent from ‘First World’ postmodernism. Aijaz Ahmad, reading his admired Western Marxist colleague as ‘a Pakistani citizen’ writing ‘poetry in Urdu’, disagreed.^{Footnote 57} While saluting Jameson’s plea ‘that the teaching of literature in the US academy be informed by a sense not only of “western” literature but of “world literature”’,^{Footnote 58} Ahmad argued that ‘Third World’ nationalism, even in a version less essentialist than Jameson’s, cannot replace genuine socialism in the struggle against imperialism. Mainstream critics of the time were quick to appropriate this Marxist critique of a fellow Marxist in their effort to reject Marxism tout court, which by 1992 Ahmad felt the need to protest in his introduction to the book that included his essay.^{Footnote 59}

At least as far as Jameson’s initial Goethean motivation is concerned, however, Weltliteratur did make a comeback. A year after his essay on ‘Third World’ literature, when, as Theo D’haen notes, ‘comparative literature was at an absolute low in the United States’,^{Footnote 60} Sarah Lawall organized a summer school on teaching world literature in the US and beyond, which in 1994 resulted in the edited collection Reading world literature.^{Footnote 61} But Jameson might very well be even more interested to see a translation of a Slovak-language book published in 1993 (the birthyear of the Slovak Republic) by Dionýz Ďurišin.^{Footnote 62} Ďurišin was a former student of Jan Mukařovský, the famous proponent of the Prague Linguistic Circle whom Etiemble referenced sympathetically back in 1964 for saying that, ‘for the first time in the history of human culture, we now witness the birth of a truly universal literature’ born from the October Revolution, a literature that finally condemns ‘the subordination of the overwhelming majority of national literatures to that of some (so-called) great literatures’.^{Footnote 63}

Lawall did mention Jameson’s ‘Third World’ literature in her collection, but his essay was not, of course, the main reason for the comeback of Weltliteratur. As D’haen continues, ‘A true comeback for world literature … in the United States only happened with 9/11 and its aftermath, waking Americans up to a wider and multilingual world’.^{Footnote 64} And, whereas the US is obviously not the whole world, it is a good start as far as a global history of thinking global literature is concerned.

We can even narrow the US itself down to just one Ivy League literary department. During the semesters leading to Y2K (to use an abbreviation that, unlike that of 9/11, was expected in advance, designating even mere expectation of a non-event, the coming of the year 2000), Columbia’s Department of English and Comparative Literature was in the middle of ‘re-thinking its structure’,^{Footnote 65} which led Franco Moretti, a faculty member at the time, to write his ‘Conjectures on world literature’ for the inaugural issue of the new series of the New Left’s main scholarly outlet. The immediate global influence of that essay is easily demonstrated by the rejoinder, ‘More conjectures’, that Moretti had to give to numerous critiques only three years later. But some of the other indirect results of that departmental debate at Columbia include Gayatri Spivak’s Wellek Library Lectures in 2000, published as Death of a discipline in 2003; David Damrosch’s book What is world literature? from the same year; and Edward Said’s inclusion in his Harvard book series of Pascale Casanova’s 1999 study La république mondiale des lettres, translated as The world republic of letters in 2004, the year of the publication of Said’s own book on literature and globalization after 9/11.Footnote ⁶⁶

If we start with this last book (‘the last completed book he wrote’^{Footnote 67}), Humanism and democratic criticism is Said’s defence of Auerbachian historicist philological humanism fifty years after the first English-language edition of Auerbach’s Mimesis and ‘more than ten years after the end of the Cold War, as the global economy is going through major transformations, and a new cultural landscape seems to be emerging, almost beyond the precedents of our experiences to date’.^{Footnote 68} Based on lectures given at Columbia in 2000 and then revised at Cambridge in 2003, the book measures, according to Said’s ‘Preface’, the ‘changed political atmosphere’ that after 9/11 had ‘overtaken the United States and, to varying degrees, the rest of the world’.^{Footnote 69}

Casanova, writing a couple of years before 9/11, was less explicit about the global framework of her position of enunciation, even if her book retraces the emergence of the modern, relatively autonomous literary space as a field that, as her conclusion reads, ‘may be said to be “inter-national” in the sense that it has been constructed and unified by means of struggles and rivalries among national spaces – to the point that today it covers the entire world’.^{Footnote 70}

Casanova’s La république mondiale des lettres was ‘about to be published’^{Footnote 71} while Moretti was writing his ‘Conjectures on world literature’, a reminder to his colleagues at Columbia and beyond that ‘world literature is not an object’ but ‘a problem, and a problem that asks for a new critical method’, namely ‘distant reading’ as ‘a patchwork of other people’s research, without a single direct textual reading … where distance … is a condition of knowledge: it allows you to focus on units that are much smaller or much larger than the text: devices, themes, tropes – or genres and systems’.^{Footnote 72} Needless to say, the colleagues were not amused, not least because, as he himself admitted in advance, ‘The United States is the country of close reading’.^{Footnote 73} So when he returned in 2003 with ‘More conjectures’, he tried to explain that the ‘Conjectures’ of early 2000 had been written ‘against the background of the unprecedented possibility that the entire world may be subject to a single centre of power – and a centre which has long exerted an equally unprecedented symbolic hegemony’.^{Footnote 74}

‘More conjectures’ secured Moretti more critics, and more responses from the existing ones. These included Moretti’s by now former colleagues at Columbia, Spivak and Damrosch. Spivak downgraded distant reading to a source of reference tools for, and hence a potential object of critique of, close reading.^{Footnote 75} Her Death of a discipline was composed between her Wellek Lectures in May 2000 and the final revision in May 2002, at a time when, as her acknowledgements read, ‘the discipline of comparative literature in the United States underwent a sea change’ as ‘Publishing conglomerates … recognized a market for anthologies of world literature in translation’.^{Footnote 76} It argues for a ‘planetary Comparative Literature’, a ‘new Comparative Literature’ that ‘will touch the older minorities’ but also ‘take in its sweep the new postcoloniality of the post-Soviet sector and the special place of Islam in today’s breaking world … a Comparative Literature format – historical and linguistic – possible, for any slice chosen from any of these places, the background filled in by new reference tools on Franco Moretti’s model’.^{Footnote 77}

As for Damrosch’s 2003 book, What is world literature?, it too, ‘though not explicitly referring to Moretti’,^{Footnote 78} defends the practice of close reading, arguing that ‘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.’^{Footnote 79} But there is no critique here of publishing conglomerates or any other contemporary global phenomenon. Whereas Spivak and Said positioned themselves in the post-9/11 discussion about world literature as one would expect from pioneering theorists of postcolonial literature, Damrosch (the only participant in the debate at Columbia to be born and raised in the United States) chose to try to improve institutions such as publishing conglomerates. He went on to edit or co-edit anthologies of world literature for Longman, HarperCollins, and Pearson Longman; companions on the topic for the Modern Language Association, Peking University Press, Princeton University Press, Routledge, and Wiley Blackwell; an academic book series for Metzler; and an academic journal for Brill. He also founded an institute of world literature for Harvard, his new employer.

A year after the outbreak of the Great Recession, and as if to conclude the series of replies to Moretti that the New Left Review published following the publication of Moretti’s own ‘Conjectures’, Alexander Beecroft de-hyphenated Moretti’s (and also Casanova’s) literary world-system, literature as a quasi-economic system that forms a world of its own. He de-hyphenated world-literature in order to sketch literature not as a world but as a part of the world, thus historicizing what Moretti and Casanova had described and criticized as the literature of the bourgeois world.^{Footnote 80} He tackled Casanova and Moretti by tackling their common source, Fernand Braudel, the leader of the second, mid-century generation of the Annales school of social history. Beecroft saw Braudel’s legacy in two major points shared by Casanova and Moretti: first, world literature is not all the literature in the world, but a world of its own; and second, this world is as asymmetrical as the world of economy. Beecroft wanted to conceptualize the entire literature of the world, as well as to show that the asymmetry of modern world literature is just the latest feature of world literature. To this end, he looked both beyond literature-as-a-world and beyond literature-as-a-system.

As a result, however, six concepts had to be proposed instead of a single one, and the very notion of literature had to be projected onto times and places that simply did not have a clear-cut concept of literature. In this way, Casanova’s and Moretti’s world-literature, literature as a field with relative autonomy, covers only the last two of the six modes of world literature that Beecroft described: the national (which ‘is now clearly inadequate’) and the global (‘as it now exists in an age of proliferating media’),^{Footnote 81} which Beecroft saw as being preceded by the epichoric (in a local language), the panchoric (in a regional language), the cosmopolitan (in a literary language), and the vernacular (in a proto-national language).

Beecroft was not the only one to read Casanova’s millennial account of global literature together with Moretti’s. The same synoptic reading was offered by most of the people mentioned above who, like Beecroft, contributed influential essays on global literature around 2008 that have now all been developed into no less important books.^{Footnote 82} However, focused as it was on Braudelian economic historiography as the common source of the world-systems analysis in Moretti’s ‘Conjectures’ and of the structuralist sociology in Casanova’s The world republic of letters, Beecroft’s reading was perhaps more justified than many other attempts, where Casanova and Moretti were ‘unfairly lumped together’ owing to ‘the accidents of publishing history’, as Eric Hayot noted in his own piece on world literature and globalization.^{Footnote 83}

In that essay, Hayot’s note is to be read as a self-reflexive apology for his own synoptic reading of Casanova and Moretti. But if this is so, Hayot would do well to extend his apology to include his equally commonplace move to Damrosch’s notion of global literature as a possible alternative to both Casanova’s and Moretti’s.^{Footnote 84} Discernible even in such recent publications with textbook ambitions as Globalization and literature and Literary studies in reconstruction,^{Footnote 85} this gesture usually aims to supplement the global perspective of Casanova and Moretti with Damrosch’s much less theoretical insistence that the vast scope of world literature simply prevents all systematization of that same world literature.^{Footnote 86}

A rare exception where Casanova and Moretti are read synoptically to counter Damrosch rather than endorsing him is the work of the Warwick Research Collective. Conceptualized in a time when, in their own words, ‘the coherence of the disciplinary object of study itself’ is being challenged ‘everywhere’,^{Footnote 87} their world-literature is a world arising out of and registering the combined and uneven development of the capitalist world-system – a Trotskyist theory that Damrosch was quick to reject by noting that English translations comprise the only textual sources of these ‘materialist critics without diacritics’.^{Footnote 88}

From world-literature to littérature-monde

Finally, the debate triggered in 2000 by Moretti’s ‘Conjectures’ yielded a book of theory and a book of history, both published on the same day in 2013, as Moretti would note in interviews: his books Distant reading and The bourgeois.^{Footnote 89} What Moretti did not mention is that, on the same day, the same publishing house (the one launched by the New Left Review) also put out Apter’s book Against world literature, a volume in which Moretti’s world-literature is not merely de-hyphenated but more or less crossed out.^{Footnote 90}

In the decade between her 2003 essay on ‘Global translatio’ and her 2013 book, Against world literature, Apter suggested transnational philology as a counterweight to Moretti, before going on to defend him in her 2008 piece ‘Untranslatables’ – only to denounce him again in the book.^{Footnote 91} So, between Moretti’s ‘Conjectures on world literature’ and Apter’s Against world literature, critique of mainstream close readings of national masterpieces itself became the object of critique; Moretti’s critique of nationalist literary studies became the object of Apter’s critique. Needless to say, Apter’s critique of Moretti’s critique of methodological nationalism is not the same as methodological nationalism: Apter criticized not Moretti’s critique per se, but that which his critique ultimately defends, namely world literature. Far from defending nationalism, she criticized world literature as something that could be grasped by Moretti’s distant reading and by digital humanities in general. This, in a way, brings us all the way back to the Communist manifesto, where, as we have seen, world literature is simply a final link in a long chain of processes that are precisely criticized. Indeed, Apter does at one point translate Marx and Engels’ Weltliteratur as ‘verkehrte Weltliteratur, or screwed-up literature’.^{Footnote 92} In this sense, and in this translation, Apter’s Against world literature could be read not only as an early critique of the digital turn in literary studies, but also as the book-length unpacking of Marx and Engels’ famous punchline from the beginning of world literature criticism.

The communist manifesto was written in the months preceding the Spring of Nations of 1848. In the months preceding the Great Recession of 2008, world literature appeared in a manifesto once again, and even in a particular political campaign. But whereas the manifesto might appeal to fans of Marx and Engels’ contribution to the genre, the same cannot be said of the political campaign that reacted to it, namely the presidential campaign of Nicolas Sarkozy. Sarkozy, the head of the French right-wing party Union pour un mouvement populaire (Union for a Popular Movement), published in March 2007 a critique of a six-day-old manifesto of French literature as a global literature. Titled ‘Pour une “littérature-monde” en français’ (‘Towards a “world-literature” in French’), the manifesto was a joint effort by forty-four distinguished writers to counter the tradition of francophone literature administered from Paris with the idea of a decentralized and decolonized literature in French:

The interest in this short piece was such that it took the organizers of the manifesto, Michel Le Bris and Jean Rouaud, no more than two months to edit and publish a book-length version.^{Footnote 94} By then, however, Sarkozy was already President of France.

Sarkozy titled his swift response ‘Pour une francophonie vivante et populaire’ (‘For a living and popular francophonie’), alluding to the titles of both the manifesto and his own party. ‘La Francophonie isn’t dead’, he declared at the outset, adding that ‘the decline of French over against English is not an inevitability’ as long as France can persuade the literary stars born in her former colonies but educated in Paris not to exile themselves to the United States.^{Footnote 95} He was ready to admit that ‘we must do away with a Jacobean idea of a francophonie that crushes and suppresses: it is pointless to oppose the French language to “the languages of France.” How can we claim our cultural distinctiveness over against English and not admit it for our own regional cultures, threatened to disappear?’ He concluded, ‘From the local to the global, francophonie happily crosses all borders, but without always knowing where she’s going. We have to view this as a means for the French language to stand up to English without embarrassment.’^{Footnote 96}

If the manifesto had let writers writing in French outside France into the sphere of world literature as long as they represented French, then Sarkozy’s sudden and unexpected reply left them with a hope that they would be able to resist the lure of the New World. In either case – as contributors to the ‘world republic of letters’ whose place of residence is irrelevant, or as contributors to francophonie residing anywhere as long as it is within the former French empire – it seems that people writing in French outside France ought to contribute to literature in French. In an introductory note to the English translation of Sarkozy’s critique, Damrosch points out that ‘His response to the manifesto probably represents the first occasion when theories of world literature have figured in a presidential campaign’.^{Footnote 97} This may or may not seem strange, given that traffic in the opposite direction (from ideas about world literature to concerns about presidents) was established no less than 180 years earlier, with Goethe’s hopes that the devastation wrought by the French president-turned-emperor Napoleon would be healed by the age of world literature.