JOHN PIZER

        
                          GOETHE'S "WORLD LITERATURE" PARADIGM AND CONTEMPORARY 

                          CULTURAL GLOBALIZATION    

In a recent article on the relevance of Goethe's concept of "world literature" for contemporary comparatism (and, to a lesser degree, for Germanics), Hendrik Birus argues that Goethe's notion can help the discipline of comparative literature to recognize both the limits and possibilities of its field of inquiry. Extensively drawing upon twentieth-century interpretations of Weltliteratur, he shows that this concept demonstrates how individual comparatists can construct discrete domains of inquiry that acknowledge both the world's unity and an irreducible variety that forces us to make choices with respect to the texts we teach and research: "a systematic situating of comparatism and, thereby, of world literature as its object of inquiry cannot, in spite of a necessary cognizance of universalization, do without a counter principle of restriction."

Birus's essay is one of the most cogent of several recent analyses that draw on the world literature concept to reexamine issues such as canonicity and crosscultural literary interchange and to show that comparatists must regard the entire world as their homeland in coming to grips with the "necessary but endless task" of treating the globe's imaginative texts in a comprehensive context .  Unfortunately, however, these analyses treat only tangentially the fact that literature is becoming immanently global, that is, that individual works are increasingly informed and constituted by social, political, and even linguistic trends that are not limited to a single nation or region. Thus, it has become increasingly difficult to regard contemporary texts as simply the products of, for example, German, Nigerian, or Chinese writers, or even of European, African, and Asian authors. With the globalization of the world economy, a true world literature, which is to say a global literature, is being created. The present essay seeks to explore how Goethe's concept both anticipates and helps us to examine this trend. Just as this paradigm provided the basis for past and current comparative methodologies, so it also helps us to understand how works of the postcolonial age are not simply intertextual, but supranationally textual as well. As the title of the 1999 conference of the American Comparative Literature Association--"Comparative Literature and Cultural Transnationalisms: Past and Future"--and some of the papers read at the conference suggest, we might call this new field of inquiry "transnational literary studies." Such a domain would enhance, rather than replace, traditional comparatism. In addition, I will argue that Goethe's concept allows creative writers themselves a way to counteract the confusions that transnationalism and a concomitant loss of discrete national-cultural identity bring in their train. . . . Finally, this paper will also examine how subsequent investigators of Goethe's construct, such as George Brandes, Fritz Strich, Erich Auerbach, and, more recently, Sarah Lawall and Homi K. Bhabha come to the (sometimes unhappy) realization that cultural transnationalism has been an emerging trend for some time.