this amalgamation, the anonymous use of cultural texts and meanings acquires a certain stable form beyond the whims of everyday language and imagination. In the texts we recognize this use in clichés in the choice of genres, metaphors and in allusions pointing to the cultural horizons of the characters and the narrator.
Media-determined dissemination: If we search the shelves of any supermarket, we are likely to come across various products with a Max Havelaar label. The name was first used in this context by a Dutch NGO organization that wanted to brand coffee produced in ways that were economically and ecologically beneficial to local producers. Later on the label came to be used as a fair trade guarantee for a whole range of products. Although the origin of the name is the protagonist of Multatuli’s controversial novel Max Havelaar (1860), who stood up against Dutch colonial rule in Java, the global success of the label and the brand has nothing to do with knowledge of the novel and everything to do with media-communicated interests in conscientious consumerism as an ideology with practical consequences.
We can trace this story of the novel and the label via the Yahoo! website. The site in turn takes its name from the dirty and unruly Yahoos in the fourth book of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), at least according to Jerry Yang and David Filo, who founded Yahoo! in 1994. The exclamation mark is inserted to distinguish the name from that of a barbecue sauce and a motorboat; in other words it has nothing to do with Swift but everything to do with copyright regulations regarding names on the net. Here literature has achieved global dissemination almost despite its internal structures and meaning. Its dissemination is entirely conditioned by the media landscape through which it has traveled the world. This element of randomness in the ascription of meaning is reflected, in turn, in what might be called the “fuzzy logic” that governs the construction of time and place, the characters’ interaction and the open-ended plot structure in many contemporary novels.
In each of these three routes for the global dissemination of literature – others could be listed as well – the process of circulation points only to the sufficient but not the necessary condition for such dissemination. It is sufficient in the sense that it is a real and efficient process, but not necessary in so far as it is not anchored in textual structures. For readers of literature as world literature the task is to establish theories, methods and reading practices that allow us to see the reflections of such real processes in the texts and not to discard them as irrelevant to their literariness. From this perspective world literature is not just a complacent expansion of the context of texts we already know, studied in ways to which we have become accustomed. World literature is not the same as literature around the world; instead, it confronts us with a serious challenge to our very approach to literature, its conditions of existence and its use in the world of modern globalization.
WORKS CITED
Brandes, Georg. “Verdenslitteratur.” Samlede Skrifter 12. København: Gyldendal, 1902. 23-28.
Casanova, Pascale. La république mondiale des lettres. Paris: Seuil, 1999.
Damrosch, David. What is World Literature? Princeton: Princeton UP, 2003.
Eckermann, Johann Peter. Gespräche mit Goethe in den letzten Jahren seines Lebens. Wiesbaden: Brockhaus, 1959.
Glissant, Edouard. Le discours antillais. Paris: Seuil, 1981.
Moretti, Franco. The Atlas of the European Novel. London: Verso, 1998.
Noyes, John K. “Goethe on Cosmopolitanism and Colonialism: Bildung and the Dialectic of Critical Mobility.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 39 (2006): 443-462.
Schöning, Udo (ed.). Internationalität nationaler Literaturen. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2000.
1 Thanks to Anne Wedell-Wedellsborg.
THE MONSTROSITY OF LITERATURE:
HUGO MELTZL’S WORLD
LITERATURE AND ITS LEGACIES
David Marno, Stanford University
HUGO MELTZL AND THE HISTORIES OF COMPARATIVE LITERATURE
In order to initiate a dialogue about the underside of multiculturalism, the most recent report on comparative literature, edited by Haun Saussy, concentrates on globalization. The previous Bernheimer report promoted a future comparative literature as (multi-)cultural studies, and to make its point it tended to criticize comparative literature as a historically non-multicultural, or not sufficiently multicultural tradition. The new report, by contrast, calls attention to the problems inherent in the idea of comparative literature as (multi-)cultural studies, and looks to comparative literature’s past for alternatives. In doing so, it draws a substantially different picture of the history of comparative literature. A major change is that the scholars usually named as forerunners of the discipline – the majority of whom emigrated to the United States around or after World War II – are almost entirely neglected by the report, in favor of one scholar who had never left Europe: Hugo Meltzl de Lomnitz, editor of a journal that was apparently the first to carry the term “comparative literature” in its title in 1877.
It seems natural to ask: how could a late nineteenth century Central/Eastern European professor of Germanistik who was not only virtually unknown in the Western world until recently but who has had only a very modest impact on the study of literature, even in his own region, now displace Auerbach and others who used to epitomize the history of comparative literature?
The little that is available from Meltzl’s work in English makes this question even more puzzling – among other things, his “decaglottism,” that is, the suggestion that since comparative literature cannot cover every language of the globe, it should start off with the ten “most important” European languages: German, English, French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Icelandic, Swedish, Portuguese, and Hungarian. Haun Saussy and the other contributors in the volume seem to forgive Meltzl for omitting Asian languages, and one may have the impression that they do so partly because they find Meltzl’s provincialism exotic: “Such a list of prerequisites could perhaps only have been imagined by a nineteenth-century Central European nobleman; both admirably cosmopolitan and geographically restricted, it exhibits a certain Habsburg cut,” Saussy writes, but he is less forgiving when it comes to Romanian and Russian: “Romanian, the language of Meltzl’s immediate surroundings, is excluded, presumably and unfairly as an idiom that had created nothing more than folklore; the omission of Russian is more serious and makes the list look more politically parochial” (Saussy 8). Still, the mistake of leaving out Russian is not as significant as the feat of including Hungarian: “The inclusion of Hungarian in an otherwise unremarkable list opens comparative literature to being something other than a science of origins.” Saussy later drives this home even more emphatically:
[T]he inclusion, through Hungarian, of an irreducible philological exception, and all the exceptions to the definition of literature and literary history that were to come, had the effect of impeding comparative literature’s dissolution into one or another existing branch of the historical sciences. (Saussy 9)
Hungarian is comparable to the other languages on this list but the basis of comparison cannot be, in this case, historical, for Hungarian is neither a Romance nor a Germanic language. In Saussy’s reading, Meltzl’s gesture of including Hungarian is a sign of his refusal to be complicit with the general trend of nationalist-historicist sciences in the nineteenth century.
Some go even further in emphasizing the emblematic value of Meltzl’s work for today’s comparative literature. David Ferris cites Meltzl as one of the first representatives of comparative literature as an impossible discipline:
What is comparative literature … if not a discipline transfixed with, and distracted by, the totality of its impossibility as well as the infinite task of translating and transforming this impossibility, a discipline only able to survive in the failure of its own inmost tendency …? (Ferris 93)
How, in other words, is comparative literature to proceed in a world that accuses