Goethe's World Literature Paradigm: From Uneasy Cosmopolitanism to Literary Modernism

Abstract

This chapter discusses Goethe's “world literature” ( Weltliteratur ) paradigm in its historical origins in a period of uneasy cosmopolitanism in the wake of the Congress of Vienna. The world literature paradigm arose in this milieu, and can be seen as an attempt to transcend the budding, albeit often cultural and localized, nationalism after the Napoleonic Wars. Goethe's discomfort with any form of nationalism is evident in his play Des Epimenides Erwachen (Epimenides's awakening) though it was commissioned to celebrate the Alliance's victory over Napoleon. After an initially positive reception, Young Germany authors and their liberal allies, who advocated German unification, turned against Goethe's world literature paradigm, and the cosmopolitan aspect of the concept was rejected for the next century. Nevertheless, Goethe and his paradigm influenced the development of literary trends in his lifetime and beyond. This is certainly the case with modernism, and the chapter concludes with a focus on Goethe's impact on this movement.

Ambivalent borders and hybrid culture: The role of culture and exclusion in historical European discourses of migration

“…The notion of freely exchanging culture thrives at the heart of Goethe’s observations about the literary status of Europe in his imagining of ‘world literature’ ( Weltliteratur ). In this great cosmopolitan imagining of culture intellectualised in the form of literature, Goethe ‘directly questions the viability of national literature and calls for authors the world over to work together to bring about a literature informed by the knowledge and insights of literary discourses around the world’ (Pizer, 2019: 2). He places great emphasis on literary and linguistic exchange as a positive uniting force, concluding,It is pleasant to see that intercourse is now so close between the French, English, and Germans, that we shall be able to correct one another.…”

“…Here, the nation is valued much more explicitly than the arguments put forward by more cosmopolitan or at least Europolitan thinkers, heretofore mentioned, such as Goethe and Voltaire. Fichte’s ‘paradoxically patriotic cosmopolitanism’ (Pizer, 2019: 3) recognises the need for migration in cultural terms while wishing to limit it for the sake of preserving what lies within national borders (puzzlingly this applies ostensibly also to culture). Here, culture is uniquely embedded in a strange ambivalence as Fichte seeks continental fusion at the same time as national preservation.…”