论歌德的“世界”及其世界文学

Goethe's World and Weltliteratur

近年来学界在讨论世界文学时,习惯于将歌德的世界文学当做理念或文本来引用,却常常忽略了它首先是一个历史事件。歌德时代的德意志知识分子在建构民族国家受挫的情况下,发展出"文化民族"的集体认同,同时将世界主义精神视为民族优越性的体现。这种奇特的认同(一个体现着世界主义精神的文化民族)也存在于歌德的世界文学观中,反映出后者的复杂面相:被建构的"德国"支撑着歌德的世界文学观;反过来,歌德的世界文学观也在对"德国"进行着意义的填充。但歌德并非民族主义者,而是一个精英主义者,他观察到大众趣味的低下,因此对已然借着市场和读者降世的世界文学频发警醒之语,并对由精英文学家们的团结和交流创造出来的世界文学抱有期许。

In recent years, scholars always choose Goethe＇s Weltliteratur as the starting point of the discussion on World Literature, but sometimes forget that Goethe＇s notion was not only an idea or a text, but also a historical event defined by specific historical context. In Goethe＇s era, failing to build a state-nation, the German intellectuals constructed a col- lective identity called ＂culture-nation＂, and took cosmopolitanism as the source of German superiority. As a historical participation, Goethe＇s Weltliteratur absorbed such kind of iden- tity as well as its complexity ： the construction of Germany supported the notion of Weltlite- ratur, meanwhile, the notion itself was a section of the progress of that construction. But this is not to say that Goethe was a nationalist. Actually, he was rather an elitist. He wit- nessed the tasteless Masses who came along with world markets, so he warned that the Weltliteratur of such kind of readers is meaningless, or even harmful. By contrast, he was expecting the Weltliteratur that will be created by elites all over the world, therefore an elit- ism gene had been planted into the development of world literature.