Prendergast Christopher (ed.) Debating World Literature

Verso, 2004. — 365 p.In the continuing debates about the cultural dimensions of globalization, the question of ‘literature’ has been something of a poor relation. This volume seeks to redress the balance. Its starting point is Goethe’s idea of Weltliteratur, from which it travels out to various parts of the globe at different historical junctures. Its concerns include the legacy of Goethe’s idea, variable understandings of the term ‘literature’ itself, cross-cultural encounters (the contact of the oral and the written, the paradoxes of ‘exoticism’), the nature of ‘small literatures’, and the cultural politics of literary genres (poetry and the novel). The underlying objective of the volume is to transcend the pieties and simplifications of polemic in a seach for the complexity embodied in the linking of the two terms ‘world’ and ‘literature’.
Quite what Weltliteratur meant (to Goethe and his age) and what it means (or might mean) to us are still very live issues, if only for the reason that ‘globalization’, if it exits at all, is not a state of a process, something still in the making. Goethe’s idea was itself cast in the form of a thought-experiment, a groping reach for a barely glimpsed future... By the same token, what we make of it today is necessarily open to indefinitely extended reflection and debate.
Christopher Prendergast is Professor of Modern French Literature at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of King’s College Cambridge. He is the co-editor of World Reader, an anthology of world literature.
Benedict Anderson is Aaron L. Binenkorp Professor of International Studies Emeritus at Cornell University. He is editor of the journal Indonesia and author of Java in a Time of Revolution, The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia, and the World and Imagined Communities.
Emily Apter is Professor of Comparative Literature and French at New York University. Her published works include The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature and Continental Drift: From National Characters to Subjects.
Stanley Corngold is Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Princeton University. He is translator and editor of the Norton Critical Edition of Metamorphosis, author of Lambent Traces: Franz Kafka, Franz Kafka: The Necessity of Form, Complex Pleasure: Forms of Feeling in German Literature, The Fate of the Self: German Writers and French Theory, and Thomas Mann, 1875–1955. He is the recipient of Literary Paternity, Literary Friendship: Essays in Honor of Stanley Corngold.
Franco Moretti teaches English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He is the author of Signs Taken for Wonders, The Way of the World and Modern Epic, all from Verso.