World Literature
World literature names both an old aspiration — Goethe's vision of a literature shared across nations — and a contemporary research field that studies how texts circulate, gain value, and are read beyond their cultures of origin. It is among the most contested and generative frames in comparative literature today.
Definition
The study of literature as a phenomenon that circulates beyond its language and culture of origin, together with the theoretical models that account for how works become 'world' literature through translation, reception, and consecration.
Scope
Covers the concept and study of world literature from Goethe's Weltliteratur through its twentieth- and twenty-first-century revivals: circulation and reception across cultures, world-systems and field models of literary value, the politics of translation and untranslatability, and postcolonial reframings of the global literary field. It is concerned with the transnational life of texts rather than with any single tradition.
Sub-topics
Core questions
- What makes a work 'world literature' rather than merely national or foreign literature?
- How do texts circulate, gain prestige, and accrue meaning as they move across cultures?
- Is the world literary field a unified system, and if so is it equal or hierarchical?
- What is the role of translation, and what is lost or resisted in the untranslatable?
- How do postcolonial and peripheral perspectives reshape the idea of world literature?
Key theories
- Weltliteratur
- Goethe's notion that national literatures were giving way to an emerging epoch of world literature in which works and writers would converse across borders.
- World literature as circulation
- Damrosch defined world literature not as a fixed canon but as a mode of circulation and reading — works that gain in translation and live actively beyond their culture of origin.
- World-system of literature
- Moretti and Casanova modeled world literature as a single but unequal system with cores and peripheries, in which forms travel from dominant centers and value is consecrated unevenly.
- Untranslatability
- Apter resisted frictionless models of world literature by insisting on the untranslatable as the site where cultural specificity blocks easy circulation.
History
Goethe popularized Weltliteratur in conversations recorded by Eckermann in 1827, drawing on Enlightenment cosmopolitanism and his reading of non-European works. The idea lay relatively dormant in academic practice until a turn-of-the-millennium revival: Moretti's 2000 'Conjectures' and Casanova's 2004 world-systems model, Damrosch's 2003 circulation-based definition, and Apter's 2013 untranslatability critique together made world literature a central and contested research program.
Debates
- System versus circulation
- Whether world literature is best understood as a structured, unequal world-system (Moretti, Casanova) or as a flexible mode of circulation and reading (Damrosch).
- Translatability versus untranslatability
- Whether world literature's reliance on translation enables genuine global comparison or flattens the resistant specificity that Apter terms the untranslatable.
Key figures
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
- David Damrosch
- Franco Moretti
- Pascale Casanova
- Emily Apter
Related topics
Seminal works
- goethe1827eckermann
- damrosch2003
- casanova2004
- moretti2000
- apter2013
Frequently asked questions
- Is world literature a canon or a method?
- Recent theory, especially Damrosch's, treats it less as a fixed list of great books than as a mode of circulation and reading: a work becomes world literature when it travels beyond its origin and is actively read in new contexts, often in translation.
- Who coined the term Weltliteratur?
- Goethe is credited with popularizing the term in conversations recorded by Eckermann in 1827, though related cosmopolitan ideas predate him.