A Brief History of World Literature
An excerpt adapted from the book Engendering Cosmopolitanism Through the Local by Jacquelyn Chappel (2019).
“World Literature” is a course that has been offered in many high schools and even post-secondary English programs since WWI. The term first arose in the early 19th-century but gained resurgence after WWI and WWII, and again most recently after the attack of the World Trade Center on September 11. This tortuous history informs the various definitions of World Literature that circulate today. Although the course initially intended to broaden and internationalize literature curriculum, World Literature has come to refer to many things: a Eurocentric literary curriculum charaterized by a traditional canon; multicultural literature, which focuses on the American and European ethnic experiences; and finally any literature, essentially rendering the term meaningless.
The term World Literature is attributed to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe who coined the term weltliteratur when he observed writers like Franz Kafka who succeeded in finding an audience outside of their home country. In 1827, Goethe famously remarked that “the epoch of world literature is at hand” (as cited in Damrosch, 2003). As a result of changes in communication and technology (Choo, 2013), these World Literature texts crossed national boundaries and, despite barriers in culture and even language, were widely read outside the author’s home country, signaling a new global age in literature (Damrosch, 2003).
Despite the term’s European origins, some contend that World Literature has been a uniquely American course of study (Lawall, 1994; Pizer, 2006), arising after World War I (Choo, 2014). The Lincoln High School curriculum, the first recorded curriculum involving World Literature in the United States, hoped to introduce students to texts outside the national traditions of British literature — which dominated literature curriculum, and American literature, then nascent (Choo, 2014). The study of literature from other parts of the world, it was hoped, would produce “world citizens with a sense of common humanity.” The purpose of World Literature was then, as it is now, “to broaden reader’s horizons through the encounter with cultural difference” (Damrosch, 2003, p. 121). Comparativists in the postwar era hoped World Literature would provide a cure for nationalism, separatism, jingoism and violence (Damrosch, 2003). Many looked to a course in World Literature as a “source of redemption from global trouble” (Smith, 2011, p. 585). “Wars and its aftermath motivated the urgent call for World Literature study,” Smith writes (p. 591). In the aftermath of war with little-known, distant places becoming increasingly relevant to the United States, many hoped a course in World Literature would make American students into more global citizens with a better understanding of their place in the wider world. World Literature hoped to introduce students to foreign cultures to recognize their similarities and differences, a theme that recurs in World Literature pedagogy (Boglatz, 2005; Cooppan, 2009; Nandi, 2013; Needham, 2009; Reese, 2002; Richardson, 2011; Short, 2012; Thomas, 2007). Looking to the roots of the high school World Literature curriculum reminds educators that the interest in globalization in education is not new.
Even as some hoped World Literature would provide students a more global outlook, some anthologists designed World Literature curricula that sought to establish a cultural alliance between Europe and America and a “common Western heritage” (Nandi, 2013, 78). Richard Moulton’s World Literature and Its Place in General Culture (1911) situates World Literature in the context of the English-speaking world. Philo Buck, the founder of Comparative Literature, similarly asserted a cultural alliance between Europe and America in contrast to non-western civilizations (Nandi, 2013). These courses, which emphasized the Anglo-European literary tradition, began to develop between the two world wars even as others hoped World Literature would be a “source of redemption from global trouble” (Smith, 2011).
Because of the daunting scope of World Literature, post-World War II interest in World Literature retracted into Comparative Literature, centered on a comparative study of the literatures of continental Europe (Spivak, 2009). Because no one could possibly know the entirety of world literatures, area studies experts, fluent in the languages of the source texts, retreated into their Comparative Literature departments, which tended to highlight the Romance languages. English departments remained true to their expertise in texts originally written in English, and the interest in a broader non-Western literature curriculum was not realized.
Beginning as early as the 1960s and continuing into the 1980s and 1990s, post-colonial theorists, such as Edward Said and Gayatri Spivak, called the academy on their continued Eurocentric interpretation of World Literature in the Culture Wars. Spivak called World Literature a misnomer for a collection of primarily European works, while Said saw World Literature as colored by an Anglophone post-colonial past mired by Eurocentric approaches (Smith, 2011). World Literature has been called “NATO Literature,” and is similarly attacked as a “Greater West European Co-Prosperity sphere” (Damrosch & Spivak, 2011, p. 460). Both labels attack World Literature’s historically Eurocentric focus.
Traditionalists like Alan Bloom and E. D. Hirsch fired back, defending the need for a canon in order to preserve a sense of a Western cultural heritage. According to Bloom and Hirsch, a common curriculum ensured American students shared a sense of cultural literacy and tradition, one of the purposes of education. Bloom’s vision of a canon drew heavily from European and Americans traditions (Damrosch, 2009), excluding both minority American literature and literature from non-Western nations.
One scholar meekly defended the canon by saying, “All the great literature is not here; perhaps all that is here is not great. But these stories are representative of the places and times from which they sprang” (Magill, cited in Damrosch, 2003, p. 124). As early as the 1960s, others made pleas to either broaden World Literature or abandon it altogether (Damrosch, 2003). No one won the Culture Wars, and while the issues remained the same, the tenor of the debate changed after the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, which spurred America’s increased military involvement in the Middle Easter and exacerbated tensions with immigrants to the US.
After 9/11, Americans were once again reminded about “our remote and foreign others” (Smith, 2011, p. 600), and the debate shifted away from canon formation. Scholars argued for a need to revisit the ethics of teaching and reading the literature of the global other. In this post-9/11 world, scholars, fed up with the debates over the canon, recognized the impossibility of introducing their students to everything they deemed “important”. After 9/11, scholars once again recognized the urgent need to introduce students to the literatures of foreign countries outside the European tradition, regardless of whether or not agreement could be reached on an adequate reading list or definition of World Literature.
Today at the high school level, World Literature has several different definitions, arising from this tangled history. In my conversations with teachers over the years, teachers sometimes assumed World Literature referred to the canon of all the great literature of the world, represented by texts such as Homer’s The Odyssey and the plays of Shakespeare. At other times, teachers assumed World Literature referred to texts by ethnic minority authors such Amy Tan and Sherman Alexie. At other times, World Literature referred to international literature including ancient sacred texts such as the Epic of Gilgamesh and contemporary texts such as Marjane Sartrapi’s Persopolis. At other times still, World Literature referred to all literature, making it so pluripotent, it is no longer useful. So problematic is the term, many have called for doing away with “World Literature” altogether (Damrosch, 2003; Lawall, 2009; Shankar, 2012; Spivak, 2003; wa Thiong‘o, 2012).
Jacquelyn Chappel holds a PhD in Curriculum and Instruction. She teaches in the University of Hawaii system.
Video resource: A Brief History of World Literature.
References:
Boglatz, J. (2005). Talking race in the classroom. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.
Choo, S. (2013). Reading the world, the globe, and the cosmos: Approaches to teaching literature for the twenty-first century. New York, NY: Peter Lang.
Choo, S. (2014). Cultivating a hospitable imagination: Re-envisioning the World Literature curriculum through a cosmopolitan lens. Curriculum Inquiry, 44(1), 68−89.
Cooppan, V. (2009). The ethics of world literature: Reading others, reading otherwise. In D. Damrosch (Ed.), Teaching world literature (pp. 34–43). New York, NY: The Modern Language Association of America.
Damrosch, D. (2003). What is world literature? Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.
Damrosch, D., & Spivak, G. C. (2011). Comparative literature/world literature: A discussion with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and David Damrosch. Comparative Literature Studies, 48(4), 455–485.
Lawall, S. (1994). Reading world literature: Theory, history, and practice. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.
Nandi, S. (2013). Reading the “other” in world literature: Toward a discourse of unfamiliarity. In M. A. Raja, H. Stringer, & Z. Vandezande (Eds.), Critical pedagogy and global literature: Worldly teaching (pp. 75–96). New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.
Needham, A. D. (2009). The place of difference in cross-cultural literacy. In D. Damrosch (Ed.), Teaching World Literature (pp. 73–85). New York, NY: The Modern Language Association of America.
Pizer, J. (2006) The idea of world literature: History and pedagogical practice. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University.
Reese, J. (2002). Learning for understanding: The role of world literature. English Journal, 91(5), 63–69.
Richardson, T. (2011). At the garden gate: Community building through food: Revisiting the critique of “food, folk, and fun” in multicultural education. Urban Review, 43, 107–123.
Shankar, S. (2012). Flesh and fish blood: Postcolonialism, translation, and vernacular. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Short, K. G. (2012). Story as world making. Language Arts, 90(1), 9–17.
Smith, K. (2011). What good is world literature: Pedagogy and the rhetoric of moral crisis. College English, 73(6), 585−603.
Spivak, G. (2009). Rethinking comparativism. New Literary History, 40(3), 609–626.
Thomas, L. (2007). When literature discussion seems to go nowhere: Reevaluating teaching and learning. WOW Stories: Connections from the Classrooms, 1(1). Retrieved from http://wowlit.org/on-line-publications/
wa Thiong’o, N. (2012). Globalectics: Theory and the politics of knowing. New York: Columbia University Press.
