ABSTRACT
In this first chapter we take a look at how “world literature” got its name, and at some of the fluctuations that name, and the idea or ideas it has stood for, have undergone over the past two centuries or so. Put at its simplest, we see the story of world literature coming full circle over these two centuries, with the more recent and most influential commentators adopting a position that is close to that of the man who first made the term popular. That man was the German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832). Until recently it has been commonplace to assert that he coined the term “Weltliteratur.” We now know that this is not correct. August Ludwig von Schlözer (17351809), a German historian who also wrote a world history, already used the term in print in his 1773 Isländischen Literatur und Geschichte (Icelandic Literature and History; Schamoni 2008, Gossens in press). Yet another German, the writer Christoph Martin Wieland (1733-1813), certainly used it early in the nineteenth century in a handwritten note to a translation of Horace’s letters (Weitz 1987, Pizer 2006). However, none of these earlier uses has had the impact that Goethe’s has had. Goethe first recorded the term in his diary on 15 January 1827. In his Gespräche mit Goethe (1836-48; Conversations with Goethe) Johann Peter Eckermann (1792-1854) notes Goethe on 31 January of the same year as saying that “national literature has not much meaning nowadays: the epoch of world literature is at hand, and each must work to hasten its coming” (Strich 1949: 349), and he would regularly return to Weltliteratur over the next 4 years, almost up to his death in 1832. In all, we have twenty-one rather brief passages from Goethe’s own writings and his recorded conversation in which the term appears (Strich 1957: 369-72, 1949: 349-51). Ever since the publication of Conversations with Goethe, these passages have served as the inevitable point of departure for all further discussions on the topic. Yet nowhere in his voluminous writings does Goethe give a precise definition of Weltliteratur. In fact, Hendrik Birus (2000) details the notorious ambiguity or polysemy of Goethe’s utterances on world literature. It is not surprising, then, that these utterances have given rise to ambiguities. These ambiguities, moreover, largely stem from Goethe’s own historical situation. In
what follows we enter into the twists and turns these ambiguities have led to with regard to “world literature.”
