German Literature as World Literature

This new collection investigates German literature in its international dimensions. While no single volume can deal comprehensively with such a vast topic, the nine contributors cover a wide historical range, with a variety of approaches and authors represented. Together, the essays begin to adumbrate the systematic nature of the relations between German national literature and world literature as these have developed through institutions, cultural networks, and individual authors.

In the last two decades, discussions of world literature-literature that resonates beyond its original linguistic and cultural contexts-have come increasingly to the forefront of theoretical investigations of literature. One reason for the explosion of world literature theory, pedagogy and methodology is the difficulty of accomplishing either world literature criticism, or world literary history. The capaciousness, as well as the polylingual and multicultural features of world literature present formidable obstacles to its study, and call for a collaborative approach that conjoins a variety of expertise. To that end, this collection contributes to the critical study of world literature in its textual, institutional, and translatorial reality, while at the same time highlighting a question that has hitherto received insufficient scholarly attention: what is the relation between national and world literatures, or, more specifically, in what senses do national literatures systematically participate in (or resist) world literature?

Contributors
Acknowledgments
Note on the Text

Introduction: Departures, Emanations, Intersections

Part One: Goethe's Weltliteratur/World Literature
Chunjie Zhang, University of California, Davis, USA, “Reading Goethe's Elective Affinities (Die Wahlverwandtschaften) through The Story of the Stone (Hong Lou Meng): Immanent Divinity, Vegetative Femininity, and the Mood of Transience”
Daniel Purdy, Penn State University, USA, “Goethe, Rémusat and the Chinese Novel: Translation and the Circulation of World Literature”

Part Two: Ausstrahlungen/Emanations
Simona Moti, Kalamazoo College, USA, “Between Political Engagement and Political Unconscious: Hugo von Hofmannsthal and the Slavic East”
Kathleen L. Komar, University of California, Los Angeles, USA “Rainer Maria Rilke: German Speaker, World Author”
Martina Kolb, Pennsylvania State University, USA “Bertolt Brecht - Homme du Monde: Exile, Verfremdung, and Weltliteratur”
David Kim, Michigan State University, USA “Militant Melancholia, or Remembering Historical Traumas: W. G. Sebald's Die Ringe des Saturn”

Part Three: Schnittmengen/Intersections
Thomas O. Beebee, Pennsylvania State University, USA “From Nobel to Nothingness: The Negative Monumentality of Rudolf C. Eucken and Paul Heyse”
Paul Nissler, Stanford University, USA “A Short Survey of the Creation and Development of Common German-Latin American Space: Humboldt, Emigration, Exile and Contemporary Interaction”
Elke Sturm-Trigonakis, University of Heidelberg, Germany “Contemporary German-Based Hybrid Texts as a New World Literature”

Bibliography

Index

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