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Abstract
What precisely is the nature of the need for the category of world literature? What would the introduction of this new category do to the valence of preexisting categories? To honor Adrienne Rich, how would the “world” function as location? What are the various paths to World Literature: Colonial, post-Colonial, politics, religion, spirituality, nationalism, trans-nationalism? Does each path propose a different world? What forms of knowing and unknowing, affirmation and self-reflexivity would such a location enable or preclude? Does the World have to be Home to be the World? Conversely, Does Home have to qualify as World before it becomes Home? Goethe and Tagore, as pioneers and theorists of World Literature, have wrestled and negotiated with these questions and issues, each in his own way: Goethe from a political stand point, and Tagore from a spiritual perspective that transcends politics altogether. This essay endeavors to articulate a location somewhere between Goethe' World as Home and Tagore's Home as World, and in the process mobilize a way of thinking that is forever “between.”
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Please see the PMLA special feature on PMLA (Citation2016).
2 See Rich (Citation1986) and my essay, Radhakrishnan (Citation2016).
3 See Chakrabarty (Citation2000). “Unlearning privilege as loss” is Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s eloquent phrase.
4 For a lucid and profound elaboration of “ek-sistence,” see Martin Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism.”
5 For more on thinking literature across boundaries, see Ghosh and Miller’s (Citation2016) co-authored book, Thinking Literature Across Continents.
6 See Sartre’s Nausea for a withering critique of the figure of the autodidactic humanist who seeks an additive model of global scholarship.
7 Amitav Ghosh’s narrator in The Shadow Lines begins his story with a similar secular and affiliative critique of filial significance and sacredness. I am indebted here to Edward Said’s reading of the two terms, filiation and affiliation. See my Edward Said: A Dictionary.
8 From a different and viscerally charged political and anti-colonial perspective, Frantz Fanon seeks the total destruction of the binary machine: “The Negro is not. Any more than a White Man.”
9 See Bhattacharya (Citation1997).
10 Eckermann (Citation1930) Conversations with Goethe (Citation2003), quoted in David Damrosch.
11 Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator.”
12 Strich (Citation1949, 349–350).
13 On the fraught relationship between translatability and World Literature, see Apter (Citation2013), and The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature. Also see my essays, “Why Translate?” and “Is Translation a Mode?’
14 See Mufti (Citation2018).
15 Walter Benjamin, “Theses in the Philosophy of History.”
16 Goethe, Strich, 35.
17 Strich.
18 Gearey, 227.
19 See Rabindranath Tagore, Home and the World, and Ngugi wa Thiong’O, Globalectics, Timothy Brennan’s work on being home in the world and the collection of essays on cosmopolitanism edited by Bruce Robbins and Pheng Cheah.
20 Giorgio Agamben (Citation2004).
21 Michel Foucault, “Society must be Defended.”
22 See Khatibi (Citation1990) and Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other.