The story of Goethe’s invention of'world literature'while reading a Chinese novel is an interesting one,for it prefigures the presence of alterity in the very formation of the concept.Whether we consider worl...The story of Goethe’s invention of'world literature'while reading a Chinese novel is an interesting one,for it prefigures the presence of alterity in the very formation of the concept.Whether we consider world literature as a theoretical recognition of writing to be literature or as a body of actual texts,we often frame our discussion in a language of duality:self/other,culture/cosmopolitanism,nation/world,etc.While the force of world literature has always been its alluring ideal of'one-world-ness',it is time for us to better account for its embedded alterity,which is what energizes world literature as a discipline of study in the 21stcentury.The place to start,this essay will argue,is translation/reading.Translation as reading is not only the material condition for world literature,where texts of different language congregate to form a'republic of letters',but also creates the site of an'afterlife'in which the textuality of world literature becomes visible and realized.Like writing itself,however,translation is not a transparent text for meaning.It is an exchange of alterity,but not its equivalent.The varying strategies in translation deal with alterity,thus invigorate the discourse of sameness and difference in the concept of world literature.展开更多
文摘The story of Goethe’s invention of'world literature'while reading a Chinese novel is an interesting one,for it prefigures the presence of alterity in the very formation of the concept.Whether we consider world literature as a theoretical recognition of writing to be literature or as a body of actual texts,we often frame our discussion in a language of duality:self/other,culture/cosmopolitanism,nation/world,etc.While the force of world literature has always been its alluring ideal of'one-world-ness',it is time for us to better account for its embedded alterity,which is what energizes world literature as a discipline of study in the 21stcentury.The place to start,this essay will argue,is translation/reading.Translation as reading is not only the material condition for world literature,where texts of different language congregate to form a'republic of letters',but also creates the site of an'afterlife'in which the textuality of world literature becomes visible and realized.Like writing itself,however,translation is not a transparent text for meaning.It is an exchange of alterity,but not its equivalent.The varying strategies in translation deal with alterity,thus invigorate the discourse of sameness and difference in the concept of world literature.
