The many worlds of world literature.

Gross, David S.

LIKE SO MANY OTHER READERS of this newest member of the World Literature Today journal family (as reflected in the letters section), I am most impressed with the beautiful design and production features of the magazine; but there is also much of substance and interest in these pages. As one who has toiled in the "World Literature, 1700 to the Present" trenches at least once a year for more than thirty years, it was David Damrosch's "What Is World Literature?" that most engaged my attention in the April-June 2003 issue.

Unlike comparative literature, world literature has almost nowhere achieved departmental status. Rather, it usually is the name of a course or series of courses in an English department. Thus the question of what it is is certainly open and relevant--especially since, in early editions (at least through the 1970s), the Norton anthology of "world" masterpieces was drawn entirely from western Europe and North America. To use the word world to describe such a course or the "masterpieces" in such an anthology is a key instance of what Damrosch cites (in Steven Owen's description) as "the quintessence of cultural hegemony, when an essentially local tradition (Anglo-European) is widely taken for granted as universal."

To its credit, since its inception as Books Abroad, World Literature Today has not so defined the world. Nevertheless, Damrosch's complex and thoughtful discussion has much to suggest about the inevitable problems, complexities, ironies, and complicities that come in to play in the relations between writers and writings in what is sometimes (unfortunately) called the "Third" World and the massive power and presence of that dominating component in the Anglo-European tradition, the United States of America. For example, as Damrosch points out, Bei Dao or any of the Chinese poets and novelists that we associate with Tiananmen Square, or writers from other countries, sometimes must find their primary audience abroad because they are censored by their governments. Damrosch does not quite extend his discussion as far as pointing out that such writers may experience success in the United States or Europe partly as the result of the ideological needs of the hegemonic power--as fuel, for example, for a smug, self-satisfied complacency about Western "freedom," which conveniently ignores the disastrous effects on writers' freedoms of the concentration and monopolization of publishing in the hands of a few (primarily transnational) corporations.

Occasionally, Damrosch seems to betray certain assumptions that have been discredited by modern critical thought--as when he seems to assume that what makes a modern work a masterpiece (his example is Goethe) capable of converse with a classic is "the great ideas express[ed] anew." Might it not sometimes be the great ideas themselves that are new? But always his discussion is important and thought-provoking and a good example of what makes this magazine an important voice in the world of literature and culture.

David S. Gross

University of Oklahoma