What Is World Literature? Study Notes

Goethe and the Origins of Weltliteratur

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe coined the term "Weltliteratur" (World Literature) in January 1827 during a conversation with his disciple Johann Peter Eckermann. Goethe argued that poetry is the "universal possession of mankind" and that the era of strictly national literature was coming to an end. This concept signaled a new cultural awareness of global modernity, envisioning a "literary market" where nations exchange intellectual treasures similarly to economic goods. Goethe’s own voracious reading habits included English, French, Italian, Latin, and even Chinese novels and Serbian poetry, illustrating his belief that individual literatures must be refreshed by foreign interest to avoid exhaustion.

However, Goethe’s vision was complex and often contradictory. While he advocated for openness to foreign works, he simultaneously maintained an elitist stance—fearing that "serious and intellectual" works might be submerged by a rising "flood" of mass-market popular literature. He also maintained a classicist bias, arguing that while various foreign literatures are valuable, the ancient Greeks must always serve as the ultimate pattern or model for beauty. His perspective was further filtered through his personal situation in a then-provincial Germany, leading him to view the wider world as an "expanded fatherland" that could provide what home soil lacked.

The transmission of Goethe’s ideas was significantly shaped by Eckermann’s "Conversations with Goethe." Published years after Goethe’s death, the book functions as both a portrait of the genius and an autobiography of Eckermann. Interestingly, the international reception of the "Conversations" often saw the "provincial" Eckermann’s role diminished or erased in translation; for instance, English editions frequently presented the book as being authored by Goethe himself, systematically editing out Eckermann’s subjective experiences and emotive language.

Defining and Scoping World Literature

Defining world literature remains a challenge, oscillating between the "sum total of all national literatures" and more specific subsets. A viable working definition is that world literature encompasses all literary works that circulate beyond their culture of origin, either in translation or in their original language. Critically, a work only truly functions as world literature when it is actively present within a literary system outside its home base. This makes world literature not an ungraspable, infinite canon, but rather a mode of circulation and a mode of reading.

In the North American context, world literature has traditionally been viewed through three lenses:

Established Body of Classics: Transcendent, foundational works often identified with Greco-Roman antiquity and imperial values.
Evolving Canon of Masterpieces: Modern or ancient works elevated for their "great ideas," regardless of class or culture of origin.
Multiple Windows on the World: Works used as portals to understand foreign cultures, regardless of their status as "masterpieces."

Contemporary scholarship emphasizes that world literature is both multicultural and multitemporal. It should not merely focus on the last few hundred years (presentism) but must include ancient materials from Mesopotamia, Egypt, and beyond. This expansion raises questions of reception and production: many modern works are now produced specifically for global consumption, sometimes leading to "writing by numbers" that satisfies Western stereotypes rather than authentic local expression.

The Discovery and Circulation of Gilgamesh

The recovery of "The Epic of Gilgamesh" in the 19th century exemplifies the complexities of world literature’s circulation. Discovered in the ruins of Nineveh by Austen Henry Layard and Hormuzd Rassam, the epic emerged during the high tide of European imperialism. Layard, motivated by a childhood love of the "Arabian Nights," sought adventure in the Ottoman Empire, while Rassam, a native of Mosul who became an English gentleman, discovered the library of Ashurbanipal, which contained thousands of cuneiform tablets.

The decipherment of the epic by George Smith in 1872 was a global sensation because it contained a Flood story mirroring the biblical account of Noah. Initially, the epic was valued almost exclusively for its ability to corroborate (or challenge) biblical history rather than for its own literary merit. Smith’s reception was profoundly assimilative; he read the Mesopotamian text through his Protestant "spectacles" and interpreted the slaying of Humbaba as a political allegory for national liberation, reflecting 19th-century European nationalist ideals.

Modern scholarship now allows us to see "Gilgamesh" more clearly as a document of "ancient humanism." It traces a structural evolution from early Sumerian poems about Bilgames to the integrated Akkadian epic attributed to the priest Sîn-liqe-unninni (c. 1200 B.C.E.). The epic explores the gains and losses of civilization and the human fear of death. Notably, it avoids the modern novelistic interest in consistent character, tolerating contradictions that reflect its long history of redaction. Reading "Gilgamesh" today requires a detached engagement: acknowledging its ancient context without collapsing it into modern psychological or theological paradigms.

Hybrid Texts and Colonial Mexico

The survival of Aztec poetry after the Spanish Conquest provides another lens through which to view the worldly life of literature. The "Cantares Mexicanos" and the "Romances de los Señores de la Nueva España" were recorded by native informants using the Roman alphabet several decades after 1521. These poems are fundamentally hybrid, reflecting a negotiation with a devastating new reality. Traditional images of flowers, quetzal plumes, and "flower death" in battle were adapted to include Christian figures like "Dios," "Santa María," and the "Espíritu Santo."

Three key forms of this hybridity include:

Bernardino de Sahagún’s Psalmodia Christiana: A collection of psalms written in Nahuatl to replace traditional "pagan" songs. Sahagún used the complex poetic resources of Aztec verse to convey Christian dogma, creating a hallucinatory overlay of Bethlehem and the Mexican landscape filled with tropical birds.
Spontaneous Syncretism: Aztec poets enlisted God and Jesus as new patrons of war to resist Spanish rule. In these poems, the Pope reclines on a golden chair with a turquoise blowgun, shooting into the world—a striking image of intercultural collision.
Hernando Ruiz de Alarcón’s Treatise on Superstitions (1629): A record of popular Nahuatl spells and incantations. Ruiz de Alarcón intended the work as a guide for priests to identify and suppress idolatry, yet he inadvertently preserved an invaluable treasury of indigenous lyric poetry.

Specialists traditionally viewed native culture as ending abruptly in 1521. However, these texts prove that culture lived on through transculturación—a process where diverse cultures converge without necessarily merging. The Aztec poems demonstrate that a work’s meaning shifts as it moves across time and political divides; the same verse about the brevity of life meant something very different to a sovereign Aztec warrior than it did to a conquered subject of New Spain.

The Impact of Translation and Retranslation

Translation is not just a transfer of information but an interpretation that creates a "continued life" for a work. A literature stays within its national tradition if it primarily loses in translation; it becomes world literature if it gains in translation—offsetting stylistic losses with an expansion in reach and depth. Translation involves a "phenomenology" rather than an "ontology" of the work, as a literary piece manifests differently abroad than at home.

Strategic retranslation is visible in the evolution of Franz Kafka’s works. Early translations by Willa and Edwin Muir smoothed over Kafka’s regional Prague German and his idiosyncratic punctuation to create a "universalist" modernist icon whose quests were seen as spiritual or existential. Modern retranslations (like Mark Harman’s) and German critical editions (like Malcolm Pasley’s) have "invited Kafka home," restoring the calculating, self-serving nature of his characters and the "breathlessness" of his unpunctuated prose. This reflects a shift toward ethnic identity and local context, viewing Kafka as a "minor" writer carving a specific dialect out of a major language.

Similarly, ancient Egyptian love lyrics from "Papyrus Chester Beatty" have been translated variously as Heine-like universal verses or as slangy modern poems. A single quatrain involving the mss (a tunic-like garment) illustrates the undecidability of translation: the gender of the speaker is ambiguous due to inconsistent hieroglyphic markers, and the garment itself has no modern equivalent. Effective translations of such works must preserve both their immediacy (emotional resonance) and their distance (cultural and historical specificity).

The Production of Global Texts: Wodehouse, Menchú, and Pavić

In the 20th century, many authors began producing texts with an eye toward an international audience from the outset. P. G. Wodehouse, a "resident alien" in both Britain and America, created a stylized, mythic world centered on country houses and New York gangs. His work exploited the "barrier of a common language" (English), and he became a pioneer of global English literature. His work influenced later writers like Kazuo Ishiguro, who reworked Wodehouse-style myths of "heritage England" in a dark, post-colonial register.

Rigoberta Menchú’s Me Llamo Rigoberta Menchú (1983) was a collective production between the author and anthropologist Elizabeth Burgos. Intended as wartime propaganda to rouse international support against Guatemalan repression, the book blended personal testimony with a timeless ethnographic frame. While subsequent research by David Stoll revealed factual discrepancies in the narrative, the book remains a landmark of the testimonio genre—where an individual voice represents a collective history. Menchú’s second book, La Nieta de los Mayas, saw her take greater control of her own representation, though English translations often still "ethnicize" her as a childlike figure of innocence via organizatonal and stylistic changes.

Milorad Pavić’s Dictionary of the Khazars (1984) is a self-consciously global work that requires translation to achieve its full meaning. The novel, structured as an encyclopedia with Christian, Muslim, and Jewish perspectives, changes the order of its entries depending on the alphabet of the language it is translated into. While international audiences read it as a playful postmodern masterwork, it carried a sharp nationalist polemic within the context of Yugoslavia’s disintegration. Pavić’s use of the "poisoned book" metaphor suggests that world literature can provide a space of freedom from the "dictionaries of pain" which are human languages, though it can never be entirely severed from its local origin.

Defining the Triple Focus of World Literature

World literature can be summarized through three defining principles:

Elliptical Refraction of National Literatures: A literary work is always shaped by both its source culture (one focus of the ellipse) and its host culture (the other focus). This creates a double refraction where the receiving culture’s values and needs are as important as the original context.
Writing that Gains in Translation: Unlike informational texts, which neither gain nor lose, literary works destined for the world stage are enriched by global transit, which transforms them into new "semantic templates."
A Mode of Reading: World literature is a detached engagement with worlds beyond our own place and time. It is not an ungraspable canon of everything ever written, but a way for a reader to triangulate between their own situation and the manifold variety of other cultures. It is an act of the imagination that, like the image projected on a screen of mist, exists only in the shimmering conjunction of different cultural beams.

Goethe’s own voracious reading habits included English, French, Italian, Latin, and even Chinese novels and Serbian poetry, illustrating his belief that individual literatures must be refreshed by foreign interest to avoid exhaustion. He emphasized the importance of diverse literary influences, suggesting that engagement with different cultures fosters creativity and intellectual growth. However, Goethe’s vision was complex and often contradictory. While he advocated for openness to foreign works, he simultaneously maintained an elitist stance—fearing that "serious and intellectual" works might be submerged by a rising "flood" of mass-market popular literature. He also maintained a classicist bias, arguing that while various foreign literatures are valuable, the ancient Greeks must always serve as the ultimate pattern or model for beauty.

His perspective was further filtered through his personal situation in a then-provincial Germany, leading him to view the wider world as an "expanded fatherland" that could provide what home soil lacked. Goethe's own travels across Europe contributed to this worldview, allowing him to compare and contrast different literary styles and traditions. The transmission of Goethe’s ideas was significantly shaped by Eckermann’s "Conversations with Goethe." Published years after Goethe’s death, the book functions as both a portrait of the genius and an autobiography of Eckermann. Interestingly, the international reception of the "Conversations" often saw the "provincial" Eckermann’s role diminished or erased in translation; for instance, English editions frequently presented the book as being authored by Goethe himself, systematically editing out Eckermann’s subjective experiences and emotive language. This phenomenon raises questions about the authenticity of literary transmission and the impact of translators on the perception of literary figures.