Abstract
Zhang maintains that world literature is on the rise in a globalized world. Now, all literary traditions, particularly non-Western and even “minor” European traditions, should introduce their works to a global readership. But not everything that circulates in the world is world literature; only the best or canonical works of the world’s different literatures matter here. Given the imbalance of power in economic, political, and even military terms, what is now well known as world literature is still limited to major Western literary traditions. But by translating canonical works of non-Western literatures into a lingua franca like English, and following up with criticism and scholarship, we will be able to establish a set of canonical works that is truly world literature.
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Notes
- 1.
David Damrosch, What Is World Literature?, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003 ; Teaching World Literature, ed. by David Damrosch, New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 2009 ; Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, trans. M. B. DeBevoise, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004; Mads Rosendahl Thomsen, Mapping World Literature: International Canonization and Transnational Literatures, New York: Continuum, 2008; The Longman Anthology of World Literature, ed. by David Damrosch et al., 2nd ed., New York: Longman, 2008; The Bedford Anthology of World Literature, ed. by Paul Davis et al., New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2010; The Norton Anthology of World Literature, ed. by Martin Puchner et al., 3rd ed., New York: Norton, 2013, Theo D’haen, The Routledge Concise History of World Literature, London: Routledge, 2011; The Routledge Companion to World Literature, ed. by Theo D’haen, David Damrosch and Djelal Kadir, London: Routledge, 2012; Franco Moretti , Distant Reading, London: Verso, 2013; World Literature in Theory, ed. by David Damrosch, Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2014; Alexander Beecroft, An Ecology of World Literature: From Antiquity to the Present Day, London: Verso, 2015.
- 2.
Haun Saussy, “Exquisite Cadavers Stitched from Fresh Nightmares: Of Memes, Hives, and Selfish Genes,” in: Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalization, ed. by H. Saussy , Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006, p. 12.
- 3.
Terry Eagleton, “Postmodern Savages,” in T. Eagleton , Figures of Dissent: Critical Essays on Fish, Spivak , Žižek and Others, London: Verso, 2005, p. 3.
- 4.
Harish Trivedi, “Panchadhatu: Teaching English Literature in Indian Literary Context,” in: H. Trivedi , Colonial Transactions: English Literature and India, Calcutta: Papyrus, 1993, p. 229.
- 5.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe , “Conversations with Eckermann on Weltliteratur (1827),” trans. by John Oxenford, in: World Literature in Theory, ed. by David Damrosch, Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley Blackwell, 2014, pp. 19–20.
- 6.
Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers, New York: Norton, 2006, p. xv.
- 7.
Ibid., p. xvi.
- 8.
Honoré de Balzac, Le Père Goriot, Paris: Éditions Garniers Frères, 1961, p. 154; quoted in Appiah, Cosmopolitanism, p. 155.
- 9.
Appiah , Cosmopolitanism, p. 156.
- 10.
Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo, trans. by David Coward, chapter 53, Toxicology, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008, p. 528.
- 11.
Viscount de Chateaubriand , The Genius of Christianity; or the Spirit and Beauty of the Christian Religion, trans. by Charles I. White, Baltimore: John Murphy and Co., 1856, p. 188; quoted in Carlo Ginzburg, “Killing a Chinese Mandarin: The Moral Implications of Distance,” Critical Inquiry 21:1 (Autumn 1994), pp. 53–54.
- 12.
In addition to the French writers mentioned here, the metaphor of “killing a mandarin” also appears in the works of the Portuguese writer Eça de Queirós and the English writer Arnold Bennett. For a fuller discussion, see my essay, “Crossroads, Distant Killing, and Translation: On the Ethics and Politics of Comparison ,” in Zhang Longxi , From Comparison to World Literature, New York: SUNY Press, 2015, esp. pp. 18–24.
- 13.
Peter Singer, “Famine, Affluence, and Morality,” in: Philosophy and Public Affairs, vol. 1, no. 3, Spring 1972, p. 231; quoted in Appiah, Cosmopolitanism, p. 158.
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焦循 (Jiao Xun, 1764–1820): “孟子正义” The Correct Meaning of the Mencius, in vol. 1 of “诸子集成” Collection of Masters Writings, 8 vols. (Beijing: Zhonghua, 1954), iii.6, p. 138.
- 15.
René Étiemble, “Should We Rethink the Notion of World Literature?”, in: World Literature in Theory, ed. by Damrosch ,1974 p. 88.
- 16.
Franco Moretti , “Conjectures on World Literature” (2000) and “More Conjectures (2003)”, ibid, p. 160.
- 17.
Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, trans. M. B. DeBevoise, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004, pp. 46–47.
- 18.
Moretti , “Conjectures on World Literature” (2000) and “More Conjectures (2003)”, in: World Literature in Theory, ed. by Damrosch, p. 160.
- 19.
David Damrosch, What Is World Literature?, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003, p. 4.
- 20.
This was widely quoted in China in the 1950s and 1960s, and its source is a commemoration piece written by Marx’s son-in-law, Paul Lafargue, originally published as “Karl Marx, Persönliche Erinnerungen (September 1890)” in Die Neue Zeit, available online at Marxists’ Internet Archive. Accessed at https://www.marxists.org/deutsch/archiv/lafargue/1890/09/marx.htm, August 28, 2015.
- 21.
Damrosch , What Is World Literature?, p. 5.
- 22.
Gregory Nagy, “Early Greek Views of Poets and Poetry,” in: The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, vol. 1, Classical Criticism, ed. by George A. Kennedy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989, p. 1.
- 23.
“萧统·文选序” Preface to the Selection of Refined Literature, in “中国历代文论选” Selection of Chinese Literary Criticism from Various Dynasties, 4 vols., eds. By 郭绍虞 (Guo Shaoyu) and 王文生 (Wang Wensheng), Shanghai: Shanghai guji, 1980, 1:330.
- 24.
R. S. Pathak, Comparative Poetics, New Delhi: Creative Books, 1998, p. 99.
- 25.
Barbara Stoler Miller, “The Imaginative Universe of Indian Literature,” in: Masterworks of Asian Literature in Comparative Perspective: A Guide for Teaching, ed. by Barbara S. Miller, Armonk, New York: Sharpe, 1994, p. 5.
- 26.
Sheldon Pollock, “Sanskrit Literary Culture from the Inside Out,” in: Literary Cultures in History: Reconstructions from South Asia, ed. by Sheldon Pollock, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003, p. 62.
- 27.
Peter Stockwell, Cognitive Poetics: An Introduction, London : Routledge, 2002, p. 165.
- 28.
段成式: “酉阳杂俎” Duan Chengshi, Miscellaneous Morsels of Youyang, ed. by 方南生 (Fang Nansheng), Beijing: Zhonghua, 1981, p. 200, 201.
- 29.
杨宪益: “中国的扫灰娘故事” Yang Xianyi , “The Chinese Cinderella Story,” in “译余偶拾” Occasional Gleanings from Translation Work, Jinan: Shandong huabao chubanshe, 2006, p. 66.
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Zhang Longxi (2018). World Literature, Canon, and Literary Criticism. In: Fang, W. (eds) Tensions in World Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-0635-8_7
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