The Routledge Companion to World Literature and World History by May Hawas

Author:May Hawas
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)
Published: 2018-04-02T00:00:00+00:00

Goethe’s idea of world literature by no means considers the possibility for a writer or a reader to attach himself or herself to a particular alien model, be it Chinese, Serbian, or Spanish. If a pattern is needed, then the ultimate one is still ancient Greek. Rather, world literature appears to be for Goethe a disposition and readiness of the mind “to look beyond the narrow circle that surrounds us”, “to look about [oneself] in foreign nations”, and finally “to look at … all the rest … only historically”, while orienting oneself to the lodestar, classical Greek literature, “in whose works the beauty of mankind is constantly represented” (132). Goethe’s idea of world literature seems to consist in the openness to the world, and the appropriation of “what is good”, but while having solid roots in the classics.

Goethe, who was curious about books wherever they came from and who had a prophetic eye, might just have imagined what was going to happen in the next two centuries. He mentioned Serbian in the passage I have just quoted, and was in fact reading a translation of the Serbian poem The Prison-Key. The literature of the Slavs slowly, in flood-like fashion, entered the European canon in the course of the nineteenth century and changed the face of the then classics, with the works of Pushkin, Lermontov, Mickiewicz, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky. Scandinavia (including Finland) came next, with modern Greece, Hungary, and Gaelic Ireland following suit. By the end of the century, European literature was a whole. One could no longer talk of medieval epic, for instance, by mentioning only Beowulf, Chanson de Roland, and Cid; one would now have to consider also Edda, The Song of Igor’s Campaign,13 The Battle of Kosovo, Digenis Akritas, and the Táin.

European literature was a whole, one is tempted to say, after the fourth century, and the various national traditions went on adding to that canon. Yet in the first half of the twentieth century, Europe fought, with the two World Wars, two immense Civil Wars, which almost destroyed European civilisation. When the second one was over, Europeans finally realised they had common roots and started building economic and political unification. They also understood there was such a thing as “European” literature – at just about the time when this became far less relevant than before. It is instructive to read what Ernst Robert Curtius, who was a great medievalist, but also the first Continental critic to expound on Joyce’s Ulysses, wrote in 1948, in the Preface to his European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages:

European literature is coextensive in time with European culture, therefore embraces a period of some twenty-six centuries (reckoning from Homer to Goethe). Anyone who knows only six or seven of these … and has to rely on manuals and reference books for the others is like a traveler who knows Italy only from the Alps to the Arno and gets the rest from Baedeker. Anyone who knows only the Middle Ages and the Modern Period does not even understand these two… .

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