David Damrosch

Toward a History of World Literature

he challenges entailed in writing a global literary history are threefold, involving problems of definition, design, and purpose. Can the field of inquiry be defined in such a way that a meaning- ful history can be conceived at all? If so, could an effective organization and a manageable plan of work be devised to give concrete shape to a project of global scope? Finally, and hardest of all, could a history of world literature be written that anyone would actually want to read? In the following pages, I will seek to reach affirmative answers to these questions.

World Literature, National Contexts

ç 2003 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0026-8232/2003/10004-0001

What could a message mean to a cloud? Kalidasa travels West

10.00 For the past half-century, world literature in its North American guises has usually been opposed to national literature. Genial disregard, if not outright hostility, often obtained between the devotees of the two. With most literature faculty based in departments organized along national lines, “world literature” was treated in many schools as an introductory course, suitable for beginning students but fundamentally vague in conception and unrigorous in application, a preliminary stage prior to serious work in a literature major based on close study of a culture and its language. Even the most elaborate comparative scholarship often raised serious reservations among committed specialists. No less a book than Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1946), one of the most ambitious and impressive synoptic studies of its generation, was roundly criticized by reviewers based in one or another of the specific areas his book traversed. The classicist Ludwig Edelstein, for example, noted that Auerbach had dramatically foreshortened Greco-Roman literary history, ignoring the findings of classical scholarship to produce his stark contrast of Hebrew and Greek cultures, whereas “in the historical view, even the fifth century is not a unity.” 1 Similarly, the medievalist Helmut Hatzfeld criticized Auerbach for reading the Chanson de Roland “with the eyes of an enlightened pacifist” rather than with an understanding of what the medieval author would have believed. 2 Even René Wellek, in a review filled with faint praise, felt that Auerbach’s results were “peculiarly shifting and disconcertingly

The Politics of Global English

This article concerns the issue of cultural re-framing of a work from a distant time and place. I look at two translations of Kalidasas poem Meghaduta, “The Cloud Messenger.” The first, published by Horace Wilson in 1814, was a highly assimilative translation but was very intelligently framed in Wilsons introduction and extensive annotations to make the poem legible to readers of the Greek and Roman classics while bringing out cultural difference. My second example, by the American translator Leonard Nathan in 1976, is a much better translation but actually a less successful cultural re-framing, as Nathans introduction and notes play down the poems violence and eroticism in order to give the poem a quasi-New-Critical balance and harmony. In discussing these translations, I ask how they work for readers with no knowledge of Sanskrit or of ancient Indian culture, using the translations to suggest ways in which readers can negotiate radical cultural/temporal difference.

How to Read World Literature

English has been a global language for several centuries, spreading around the world in tandem with the British imperial adventure from the sixteenth century onward. Yet during the colonial period, English existed in a fraught relation to the local languages spoken around it. Often forbidden to read or even speak their native language in colonial schools, would-be writers in colonized countries were faced with a stark choice: to adopt the imperial language or to reject it outright—the choice underlying the famous debate in the 1970s between Nigeria’s Chinua Achebe and Kenya’s Ngugi wa Thiong’o. Ngugi rejected English as a viable language for an African writer and instead championed indigenous languages, regarding his own language of Gikuyu as the only authentic means to render his people’s experiences. In marked contrast, in his essay “The African Writer and the English Language,” Achebe declared that despite its many negative effects, colonialism did at least bring disparate peoples together, and “it gave them a language with which to talk to one another. If it failed to give them a song, it at least it gave them a tongue, for sighing.” Achebe asserted his sovereign right to adopt English as the best means to reach a broad public, and he insisted that African writers need not lose their identity while writing in the colonizer’s language, arguing instead that they should remake English on their own terms: