Goethe's "World Literature" Paradigm and Contemporary Cultural Globalization

Pizer, John

doi:10.2307/1771407

Cited by 7 publications

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“…With the globalization of the world economy, a true world literature, which is to say a global literature, is being created." 10 Here too, we see a patent conflation of the globe, a bounded object in Mercatorian space, with the world, a form of belonging or community. This understanding of worldliness in terms of the material processes of globalization leads to a deficient understanding of the normativity of world literature in two respects.…”

Section: World Literature Then and Nowmentioning

confidence: 99%

World against Globe: Toward a Normative Conception of World Literature

Cheah¹

2014

nlh

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Recent theories of world literature (Casanova, Damrosch and Moretti) have obscured its normative dimension because they have only understood the world in terms of spatial circulation, the paradigmatic case of which is global capitalist market exchange. This essay offers a critical analysis of the limitations of the recent revival of world literature. It outlines an alternative temporal understanding of the world as the normative basis for a radical rethinking of what “world literature” signifies and develops a normative account of world literature as an active power of world-making that contests the world made by capitalist globalization.

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Section: World Literature Then and Nowmentioning

confidence: 99%

World against Globe: Toward a Normative Conception of World Literature

Cheah¹

2014

nlh

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“…One of the first thinkers to popularize "world culture" as a set of outstanding cultural works taken from multiple national traditions is German writer Johann Wolfgang Goethe (1749-1832). In the 1820s, Goethe began referring to "world literature," which he described as "universally human," a tradition that includes works not just from Europe but also from Persian and other cultures (Pizer, 2000). Additionally, the idea of "world culture" bears connotations from a concept often linked to the late 19th-century British cultural critic Matthew Arnold (1822Arnold ( -1888: the idea that every national tradition has a set of texts that are superior and yet exemplary for that culture.…”

Section: World Cultural Heritagementioning

confidence: 99%