Goethe's “World Literature” Paradigm and Contemporary Cultural Globalization

European regions and boundaries: a conceptual history

“…The age of world literature is beginning, and everybody should contribute to hasten its advent " (in Moretti 2000). This statement is often cited as a protomanifesto for comparative literary studies in the twenty-fi rst century and as an indicator that the study of literature had a liberal cosmopolitan agenda whose lineage could be traced back to one of its polymath founding father fi gures (Pizer 2000 andBehdad and Thomas 2011). The positing of such a genealogy should be met with caution, however (Bernheimer 1998;Pizer 2000).…”

“…This statement is often cited as a protomanifesto for comparative literary studies in the twenty-fi rst century and as an indicator that the study of literature had a liberal cosmopolitan agenda whose lineage could be traced back to one of its polymath founding father fi gures (Pizer 2000 andBehdad and Thomas 2011). The positing of such a genealogy should be met with caution, however (Bernheimer 1998;Pizer 2000). A regionalizing outlook was much more in evidence in the "scientifi c" disciplines of linguistics and philology, and scholars in those fi elds were not always interested in establishing equivalent status or interchangeability among diff erent languages, but rather in creating genealogies and hierarchies, which tended by their nature to reinforce conceptions of "European" languages as being more developed and articulate, as against the "primitive" source-linguistic material furnished in particular by Asian (and to some extent Celtic) languages.…”

On world literature: when Goethe met Boltzmann

“…Indeed, it is an understandable reaction given that 'the appearance of a weltliteratur', as Antoine Berman notes, 'was contemporaneous with that of a weltmarkt'. 34 So, Erich Auerbach thinks about the possibilities engendered in a world literature that exists within a world that 'is growing smaller and losing its diversity;' 35 John Pizer asserts that 'with the globalization of the world economy, a true world literature, which is to say a global literature, is being created;' 36 and Mads Rosendahl Thomsen begins his recent book by claiming that world literature is 'the companion to the central keyword of our times, globalization'. 37 However, if one thinks of world literature as the entropy of national literature, the way in which a national literature 'leaks', then the relationship between the literary work and globalization seems to lose much of its primary importance.…”