Universal localities: The languages of world literature. GalinTihanov (Ed.), Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler. 2022. 252 pp.

Abstract

When world literature mounted to the top of the agenda in literary studies a few decades ago as a revived and revised take on the synthesis of literary history, literary analysis and literary theory, all important publications in this expanding field had to conceptualise and reconceptualise world literature in order to promote it as an ongoing innovative rethinking of the function of literature, of the aim of literary studies and of the criteria for the selection of material to be included as world literature. One of the many strengths of this endeavour was its acceptance without regret of being non-exhaustive. Instead, through striking examples it forced readers to rethink what literature and literary studies is about in the twenty-first century, not least a reconsideration of the past. Since the pioneering days a more complacent conceptualisation and practice of world literature studies have also come about. One such trend is the descriptive mapping of literatures across the world with no or only limited conceptual ambitions, but with the otherwise laudable aim of relativising cultural hegemonies beyond traditional centre/periphery models, Eurocentrism in particular; another is the attempt to use world literature as a catch-word to secure a visible or, even better, prominent place for the regional/national/local literature of one's own on the world map of literatures. With the ecumenical aim of opening a space of borderless global literary circulation unfettered by cultural frictions and hegemonies, the first trend risks ignoring the fact that cultural power relations continue to transmutate into new forms and move to new locations, even if some of the existing ones are relativised; the second approach tends, implicitly or explicitly, to implement literature as a tool for perpetuating cultural hegemonies, just replacing others like Eurocentrism and moving them closer to home. Weigui Fang's chapter presents the Chinese approach to world literature as a case in point. Insisting on returning to the foundational ambition of a synthesis of theory, history and analysis, the present volume is a much welcomed debate and exemplification of the continued relevance of this synthesis, each article taking one dimension as its prevalent point of departure for embracing more or less all three dimensions. The transversal focus across the three sections and eleven chapters is the complex role of languages in a world literature perspective. The term ‘language’ is taken in a very broad meaning, maybe too broad and in some need of explication. Without discussion it seems to cover the discourse of literary texts, the notions and terms used in the discourse about literary texts, and the transverbal interaction between cultures and between humans and the non-human environment. I would have preferred the term ‘interaction’ in the way it is used in the astute analysis in the editor's Coda, which unfolds the use of ‘circulation’ in discourses about world literature. This final chapter is a precise criticism of the unfounded idea of world literature as the quasi-synonym of a frictionless global cultural transparency through literature that ignores the conflicts between and within local cultures. This point of view, in the Coda taken in a theoretical perspective, builds in Sara-Louise Cooper's chapter on a textual analysis of Maryse Condé's Desirada, whereas Yulia Ivanova's detailed account of the dangers of linguistic universalism as it emerged in the European Renaissance in relation to Latin exemplifies a historical starting point. Call it interaction or language, several chapters do open a timely and stimulating discussion of languages in or about world literature with various degrees of theoretical reflections, textual analyses and historical foundations, emphasising the complex blend of languages, their hybridity, their juxtaposition, their translatability and their conflicts as the basic and culture-specific reality of world literature and world literature studies beyond any belief in global uniformity, an impossibility that precisely shapes the complexity and relevance of world literature (chapters by David Damrosch, Christian Moser, Ghazouane Arslane, César Dominguez, Pavel Sokolov). Florian Mussgnug's chapter on human interaction with the environment in the Anthropocene could, I suggest, have benefited from looking to bio-semiotics and its take on sign theory instead of the chapter's reference to language and translation. But as the author's survey article indicates, it is a young field in search of itself. The last chapter before the Coda, Jeremy Adler's thought-provoking chapter on the shift from a universal poetics of literature to an anthropologically defined local framing of culturally specific literatures, most decisively happening in the European Enlightenment, is a convincing argument for a global connection between the culturally specificity of literatures and legal discourse, enshrined as it is in the human rights declaration and its various legal manifestations in judiciaries across the world, that of the United Nations included. With this ending, which leads on to Galin Tihanov's Coda and is echoed in the other articles, the volume is a stimulating reminder that world literature is a necessary and ongoing experiment to be pursued both by writers and scholars.