What Counts as World Literature?

Rosy Singh, Essays in Contemporary German Literature, Goyal Publishers, 2017

This book is an attempt to trace some of the new developments that are visible in the contemporary German literary landscape. The fall of the Berlin Wall 1989 and the re-unification are generally taken as markers for contemporary German language literature. The turning point is the desire and the courage of some writers to explore themes other than the war and the holocaust. A cultural normalisation is happening but this development is still in its natal stages.

Although the concept can be traced back to the nineteenth century or earlier, world literature has become an increasingly significant part of English and comparative literature in the past two decades. While the inclusion of works from different cultures and nations has greatly enhanced the study of literature, some critics have lamented the consumerist impulse underlying the project of world literature, as with Emily Apter’s provocative book, *Against World Literature*, which has challenged the field’s inability to account for “untranslatability.” In this essay, Robert Tally discusses the use and disadvantages of world literature, citing both proponents and the detractors, and discussing his own attraction to Weltliteratur as a way of subverting the intensive nationalism of American Studies. Drawing upon earlier visions of Goethe, Marx, Auerbach, and Said, along with recent critics such as Franco Moretti, Pascale Casanova, and David Damrosch, Tally traces the trajectory of his postnationalist vision of a world literature that may simultaneously preserve cultural specificity without fetishizing it and engender transcultural connections without effacing difference, thus serving comparative literary studies in an age of globalization.

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, 2013

Dedicated to the dissemination of scholarly and professional information, Purdue University Press selects, develops, and distributes quality resources in several key subject areas for which its parent university is famous, including business, technology, health, veterinary medicine, and other selected disciplines in the humanities and sciences. CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, the peer-reviewed, full-text, and open-access learned journal in the humanities and social sciences, publishes new scholarship following tenets of the discipline of comparative literature and the field of cultural studies designated as "comparative cultural studies.

2013

Professor in the Humanities. The Center promotes teaching and research of modern German literature through the University Libraries' Contemporary German Literature Collection. The largest of its kind in North America, this distinctive collection of monographs and literary journals is housed in the John M. Olin Library. As the Collection outgrew its original location on level A, it has been relocated to level B in the call number range PT2660-PT2728. Materials are made available to scholars at other universities via interlibrary loan. In addition, faculty, students, and the general public can utilize collection materials in person. Each year, Washington University's Germanic Languages and Literatures Department, in cooperation with the University Libraries, compiles a bibliography of items added the previous year. Organized by author or editor, entries include local call numbers as well as subject and genre descriptors. Additional information, including links to summaries and reviews, can be found in the Libraries' Catalog (http://catalog.wustl.edu). Current and past issues of the bibliography are available at http://german.wustl.edu/kade/bibliography. This 28th issue of the Bibliography includes entries for over 633 volumes published in 2013. These acquisitions include novels, poetry, short story collections, essays, autobiographical works, and literary and cultural periodicals from publishers in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. I hope you find this bibliography helpful. Additional information about the Collection can be found at http://libguides.wustl.edu/contemporarygermanliteraturecollection and at the web page for the Max Kade Center for Contemporary German Literature (http://german.wustl.edu/kade). Please don't hesitate to contact me with questions or suggestions about the Bibliography or the Collection.

2018

This paper argues that German literary studies was, from its inception, an entirely nationalist and nation-building endeavor, perhaps the quintessential nationalist project. Among the discipline's foundational premises are its belief in and commitment to a diversity of culturally individuated national communities (rather than one uniform humanity), a non-hierarchical plurality of vernaculars (rather than classical languages), and historically inflected and culturally expressive aesthetic forms (rather than transhistorically and transregionally valid templates of excellence). Three disciplinary activities of early Germanistik—Germanic historical linguistics, vernacular canon formation, and national literary history—are introduced as key instruments of nationalization. In conclusion, the paper claims that contemporary German Studies in the US, thankfully a reflective and critical enterprise, nonetheless remains institutionally completely dependent on the paradigm of the linguistically and culturally defined nation.

2017

The Max Kade Center for Contemporary German Literature was founded in 1984 at Washington University in St. Louis by Paul Michael Lützeler, Rosa May Distinguished University Professor in the Humanities. The Center promotes teaching and research of modern German literature through the University Libraries' Contemporary German Literature Collection. The largest of its kind in North America, this distinctive collection of monographs and literary journals is housed in the John M. Olin Library on level B in the call number range PT2660-PT2728. Collection materials are made available to scholars at other universities via interlibrary loan. In addition, the Collection can be utilized in person. Each year, Washington University's Germanic Languages and Literatures Department, in cooperation with the University Libraries, compiles a bibliography of items added the previous year. Organized by author or editor, entries include local call numbers as well as subject and genre descriptors. Additional information, including links to summaries and reviews, can be found in the Libraries' Catalog (http://catalog.wustl.edu). Current and past issues of the bibliography are available at http://german.wustl.edu/kade/bibliography.

2020

Reflexionen des Gesellschaftlichen in Sprache und Literatur. Hallesche Beiträge. Band 8: Literature in a globalized context. 11th International Colloquium in Romance and Comparative Literature (Universities of Brno, Halle and Szeged). Carmen González Menéndez, Daniel Santana Jügler and Daniel Hofferer (eds.) Publikation des Promotionsstudiengangs an der Internationalen Graduiertenakademie der Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg: Sprache – Literatur – Gesellschaft. Wechselbezüge und Relevanzbeziehungen vom 19. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart.

Journal of European Studies

New German Critique, 2021

Largely overlooked in the booming scholarship on world literature, literary globalization, and transnational modernism, a world literature of socialist internationalism was imagined, written, theorized, and practiced in the aftermath of World War I, representing the first attempt to actualize the idea of world literature under the auspices of a social and political mass movement. This article develops and illustrates five theses about this internationalist world literature. It thereby sketches aspects of the history of internationalist world literature in Germany between 1918 and 1933 and formulates historical, historiographical, poetological, and literary and cultural theoretical interventions into the field of world literature studies. In particular, the article develops the notions of the transnational literary counterpublic and of realist modernism while tracing ideas about transnational class literatures and nonnormative imaginaries of the proletariat.

Symplokē, 2019