World Literature I

Literature, a body of written works. The name has traditionally been

applied to those imaginative works of poetry and prose distinguished by the
intentions of their authors and the perceived aesthetic excellence of their
execution. Literature may be classified according to a variety of systems,
including language, national origin, historical period, genre, and subject
matter.
Literature is a form of human expression. But not everything expressed in
words—even when organized and written down—is counted as literature.
Those writings that are primarily informative—technical, scholarly,
journalistic—would be excluded from the rank of literature by most, though not
all, critics. Certain forms of writing, however, are universally regarded as
belonging to literature as an art. Individual attempts within these forms are
said to succeed if they possess something called artistic merit and to fail if
they do not. The nature of artistic merit is less easy to define than to
recognize. The writer need not even pursue it to attain it. On the contrary, a
scientific exposition might be of great literary value and a pedestrian poem of
none at all.

History:
The purest (or, at least, the most intense) literary form is the lyric poem, and
after it comes elegiac, epic, dramatic, narrative, and expository verse. Most
theories of literary criticism base themselves on an analysis of poetry,
because the aesthetic problems of literature are there presented in their
simplest and purest form. Poetry that fails as literature is not called poetry at
all but verse. Many novels—certainly all the world’s great novels—are
literature, but there are thousands that are not so considered. Most great
dramas are considered literature (although the Chinese, possessors of one of
the world’s greatest dramatic traditions, consider their plays, with few
exceptions, to possess no literary merit whatsoever).
The Greeks thought of history as one of the seven arts, inspired by a
goddess, the muse Clio. All of the world’s classic surveys of history can stand
as noble examples of the art of literature, but most historical works and
studies today are not written primarily with literary excellence in mind, though
they may possess it, as it were, by accident.
The essay was once written deliberately as a piece of literature: its subject
matter was of comparatively minor importance. Today most essays are written
as expository, informative journalism, although there are still essayists in the
great tradition who think of themselves as artists. Now, as in the past, some of
the greatest essayists are critics of literature, drama, and the arts.
Some personal documents (autobiographies, diaries, memoirs, and letters)
rank among the world’s greatest literature. Some examples of
this biographical literature were written with posterity in mind, others with no
thought of their being read by anyone but the writer. Some are in a highly
polished literary style; others, couched in a privately evolved language, win
their standing as literature because of their cogency, insight, depth, and
scope.
Many works of philosophy are classed as literature.
The Dialogues of Plato (4th century BC) are written with great narrative skill
and in the finest prose; the Meditations of the 2nd-century Roman
emperor Marcus Aurelius are a collection of apparently random thoughts, and
the Greek in which they are written is eccentric. Yet both are classed as
literature, while the speculations of other philosophers, ancient and modern,
are not. Certain scientific works endure as literature long after their scientific
content has become outdated. This is particularly true of books of natural
history, where the element of personal observation is of special importance.
An excellent example is Gilbert White’s Natural History and Antiquities of
Selbourne (1789).
Oratory, the art of persuasion, was long considered a great literary art. The
oratory of the American Indian, for instance, is famous, while in Classical
Greece, Polymnia was the muse sacred to poetry and oratory. Rome’s great
orator Cicero was to have a decisive influence on the development of English
prose style. Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address is known to every
American schoolchild. Today, however, oratory is more usually thought of as a
craft than as an art. Most critics would not admit advertising copywriting,
purely commercial fiction, or cinema and television scripts as accepted forms
of literary expression, although others would hotly dispute their exclusion. The
test in individual cases would seem to be one of enduring satisfaction and, of
course, truth. Indeed, it becomes more and more difficult to categorize
literature, for in modern civilization words are everywhere. Man is subject to a
continuous flood of communication. Most of it is fugitive, but here and there—
in high-level journalism, in television, in the cinema, in commercial fiction, in
westerns and detective stories, and in plain, expository prose—some writing,
almost by accident, achieves an aesthetic satisfaction, a depth and relevance
that entitle it to stand with other examples of the art of literature.
World literature is sometimes used to refer to the sum total of the
world’s national literatures, but usually it refers to the circulation of
works into the wider world beyond their country of origin. Often used
in the past primarily for masterpieces of Western European literature,
world literature today is increasingly seen in global context. Readers
today have access to an unprecedented range of works from around
the world in excellent translations, and since the mid-1990s a lively
debate has grown up concerning both the aesthetic and the political
values and limitations of an emphasis on global processes over
national traditions.

CLASSIFICATION OF LITERATURE:
https://www.slideshare.net/DrJeanneathVelarde/classification-of-literature-by-drjeanneath-d-velarde
Globalization and Literature
When we think of globalization and forms of entertainment, we immediately
think of the Internet, social media, movies, or television shows. But,
contrary to popular belief, literature also holds an important place in the
flow of entertainment media that is coursing through the veins of public
consumption in our globalized world. The technological advances that are
connecting people worldwide through shared information are also serving
as a medium to disseminate books across national and cultural boundaries.

The term “world literature” was first used by the German writer and
statesman Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, referring to the dissemination of
literature from and to countries across the globe. Goethe famously
stated
“National literature is now a rather unmeaning term; the epoch of world
literature is at hand, and everyone must strive to hasten its approach.”
World Literature, in the modern sense, refers to literary works that are
translated into multiple languages and circulated to an audience outside
their country of origin.

For the 200 years or so that followed this pronouncement, critics have
sought to tie down the idea of “world literature” – what is it? how is it
different to “national literature,” or simply just “literature”?

Today, the attempts to theorize world literature fall into two camps.
On the one side is a belief that world literature is simply the best
literature that each nation has to offer; and on the other side is a
belief that world literature is not an object at all, but rather a process.
For those who fall into the second camp, as described here, the problem
with world literature as the best of national literature is that it makes it an
impossibly large area of study. Given that many scholars struggle to keep
up with a very limited area of specialization (such as Irish literature, 1900-
1920), they ask whether one can really ever claim to be an expert in “world
literature.” Rather, it seems as though we must think of world literature
as a process – a way of reading, not an object of study.
This is the position to which my thoughts are most closely aligned. That
said, my particular view of world literature as process differs from
those posed by people like Damrosch, Moretti, and Casanova. Let me
briefly explain:

I think physics gives us an interesting way into this debate over world
literature. More specifically, for me the idea of entropy (degree of
disorder or uncertainty of an object) describes how we should think
of world literature. Imagine, if you will, national literature as an inflated
inner-tube of a bicycle tyre. According to entropy, the air in an inflated
inner-tube is in a highly ordered state (because it cannot move around
much). This is a “low” state of entropy because entropy describes the
disorder of a system – no movement means highly ordered; means low
entropy. Interestingly, national literature orders literary work in just
this way. Books stop being just books; they become part of a literary
tradition, an element of the canon (sanctioned or accepted body of
literature), related to a genre, and so on. That is to say, they are arranged
in a very particular way – they are ordered.

For me, world literature describes the point at which this ordered system is
put to flight. Put simply, world literature is the “leak” of national
literature. One thing is always true in the study of literature: one cannot
satisfactorily define national literature. As soon as we think we have a
binding definition something happens and the definition is shown to be
incomplete. What is “American literature”? That which is written by resident
“Americans”? That which is written by Americans abroad? That which is
written by first or second generation immigrants to America? Can American
literature include texts written in German or Japanese?

We can ask similar questions of every national literature; and in each case,
the coherence of a national literature is seen to stutter and ultimately fail.

Although most critics try to explain away this failure of structure and
thereby continue to use the (decrepit) idea of national literature, I think we
should embrace this feature of national literature. Indeed, it is important
that we should do so because as physics tells us every system must leak in
this way. Actually, the second law of thermodynamics says that ordered
thermodynamic states will inevitably and irreversibly become less ordered
over time. This is world literature, the leak of national literature – the
literature that escapes the organizing grasp of national literature.

The ramifications of thinking about world literature as the leak of national

literature – as the entropy of national literature – is wide ranging, and
therefore material for another post at a later date. Perhaps thinking through
the meaning of world literature as the entropy of national literature might be
enough for now…

GOING BACK TO WORLD LITERATURE.

The simplest way of thinking of WL is that it is literature that has a

readership and an impact beyond its original language and cultural area.
Examples include the Bible, and the plays of William Shakespeare, both
of which have been translated into more than 100 languages and are read
or performed on every continent. Another example of this is the Lotus
Sutra from 1st c. India. It was translated into several languages, including
Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese, between the 3rd and 13th c,
and later it went on to inspire Allen Ginsberg’s “Sunflower Sutra” in the
mid-20th century. Clearly, the phenomenon of WL bears some relation to
the broader issue of Globalization.

Globalization refers to the ways in which forces like travel, migration,

religious conversion, trade, war, colonization, and the general
circulation of ideas increase connectivity and interdependence of
regional cultures; they increase the interactions between groups of
people that previously may have had little or no contact with each
other.

The first thing to consider is that WL is a category of literary production,

publication, and circulation that has "legs." This means that it is a work
of literature that is a touchstone of local culture; in other words, it
becomes a standard for a local culture. It then becomes an influence on
a regional culture, and later a part of the fabric of global community. It
moves from local to regional to global.

In addition to having legs, “World Literature” is literature that gains in

translation. This means that it may inspire new genres, enrich a local
tongue’s vocabulary through the adaptation of new words, blend with
regional concepts, or take on new meanings at different times and
places. These are works that are able to adapt themselves to and acquire
meaning in different cultures.

What about the "World" part of World Literature? Is it the same

"world" as when my high school offered "world languages"?

Let’s talk a bit more about what your image of “the world” is. To help you
think about “the world, ”I’m going to show you a series of maps and I want
you to think about whether there is an analogy between creating a map
and creating a work of literature. Both mapping and writing are ways of
expressing an understanding of the world; just as maps create visual
representations of the world, literature creates mental representations of
the world. It’s important to note, however, that both mapping and writing
are subjective—this means that they are created according to the
point of view of their authors.

This is the other complexity of our definition. It is relatively clear what

English literature is, or German literature: it is literature composed in those
languages. But clearly this does not apply to WL.

Let us introduce by way of explanation four major ways in which WL has

been conceived since the term was first used in the late 18th century.

1. WL as a comprehensive corpus of all literary texts in all languages

of the world
2. WL as an anthropological comparison of how different cultures
develop literary forms
3. WL as a hypercanon of "the best that has been thought and said" by
selected writers of the world
 4. WL as the process of diffusion of texts around the globe through
translation, adaptation, rewriting, etc.

Conceptually, #1 is probably the easiest to grasp: world literature is simply

all of the world's literature. On the other hand, it is the most unwieldy to
work with in practice. #2 should be thought of in opposition to #4: rather
than thinking about how literary forms or ideas move from one culture to
another, we instead look at cultures that have no contact, but notice that
each has developed myths, or each has developed lyric poetry, etc. In
actual fact, there are literary forms such as myth and lyric that seem to be
universal, whereas others, such as the novel or tragedy, seem to have
developed in a specific regions and been introduced elsewhere through
processes of globalization.
A "canon" is a group of approved or highly regarded, "must-read" texts.
Any literary anthology, since it obviously must make selections, posits its
own canon, but the idea of canon invoked in #3 is more that of a national
literary canon, those texts that have proven enduring and have continued to
"live" in the culture. The "hyper-" of "hypercanon" in #3 indicates that
WL is composed of a canon of the best of various national canons,
the best of the best. In fact, that is very much what the Longman
Anthology consists of. #4 focuses on the fact that when literary forms or
works "travel" from one part of the globe to another, they are inevitably
changed -- and they also alter the receiving culture's literary canon. WL is
that process of continual travel, rewriting, and mediation of literary
texts across cultural boundaries.

RANK the four conceptions of WL in order of their importance in

determining course design and content. Which seems, based on the
organization and activities of the course, to be most important, and which
least? Tell us what you think here....

Our own ranking would be:

1. (most important) anthropological comparison

2. learning the hypercanon
3. process of diffusion
4. (least important) comprehensive corpus
If you had a different ranking that's OK, you may have used different clues
than we did to come up with it.
You may have stumbled over "anthropological comparison" because you
signed up to study literature, not anthropology! The reason it ranks first is
because the course material is divided by regions of the world, which
indicates an anthropological concern with the expression of different
cultures through their literatures. .The literature we will read is strongly
identified with the region of the world that it comes from, while at the same
time holding enough interest for the rest of the world to have become part
of WL.

The foundational nature of many of the texts on the syllabus, from the
Analects of Confucius to the Qur'an, may have led you to select the
hypercanon as the most important element of the course. That is very
understandable, and we certainly hope you will come away from CMLIT010
with a command of a subset of the hypercanon of WL. But if that had been
our first concern, we might have organized the course according to the ten
best creative writers in world history, for example, which we did not do.

The third is the process of diffusion. If that had been our first concern, we
might have begun the course with the history of writing technology, from
cuneiform to the World Wide Web. We might also have a long theoretical
discussion of translation, which is essential for diffusion of texts across the
globe. Instead, we will examine these issues with selected texts.

Finally, it should be obvious that no three-credit course can make much

headway with a comprehensive corpus of all the world's literary texts. We
must be selective. However, there is one important comprhensive aspect to
this course and to the anthology: we attempt to include something from all
the world's continents.

For the Pennsylvania Department of Education, "World Language" is

simply a different way of saying "second language" or "foreign language,"
and in practical terms it means any language other than English. The two
WLs (World Literature and World Languages) share an idea of "world" as
moving beyond the zone of familiarity of the English language. However,
World Literature does not exclude English-language works, though it does
de-center them in relation to a course in English or US literatures.

TAKE NOTE: You will develop the ability to analyze a work of literature
based on the following components:

1. geography and culture—where does a text originate? What cultural

values does it represent?;
2. form—how is this text written? Is it verse? is it prose? is it drama?;
3. theme—what are some of the themes in a text? Do these themes
repeat themselves within one culture? Within other
cultures? Throughout time?;
4. process of dissemination—how do these texts reach other
geographic areas? How do they affect other cultures? How are they
translated in order to be understood or adapted to another culture?