Stefan Helgesson will speak about “World Literature? Some Alternatives for Transnational Literary Studies” at a seminar in the Ørecomm Open Seminar Series to be held at K3, Malmö University, 3 March 2009, 9:15 – 11 am. The seminar will be webcast.
Stefan Helgesson is lecturer and researcher in comparative literature at Uppsala University, Sweden, and literary critic at Dagens Nyheter. He is the writer of several books on Southern African literature, including his PhD dissertation “Sports of Culture: Writing the resistant subject in South Africa” (1999) and the recently published “Transnationalism in Southern African Literature” (2009). He has been one of the editors of the four-volume “Literary History: Towards a Global Perspective” (2006).
If you are not able to come in person to the seminar, it will be webcast on the ComDev portal: www.k3.mah.se/comdev (GMT 8.15-10 am). In order to access the live lecture function (and archive), you just need to apply for membership (click on the link in the left menu!).
As a preparation for the seminar you are recommended to read the introductory chapter in Mads Rosendahl Thomsen, Mapping World Literature. New York: Continuum, 2008.
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Literature is hardly more provincial than the other arts. But literary studies (comparative literature) has arguably become the most nationally oriented of all academic disciplines. How come?
The idea of a national literature goes back to the German romanticist notion of ‘one people, one language, one literature’. The French literary scholar and critic Pascale Casanova explains the successful worldwide spreading of this conception of literature as an outcome of “the Herder effect” (after philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder). As a German national literature grew and flowered in the liberation from the dominating French, so did literature play a crucial role in the post-colonial emancipation process in the former European colonies, creating new national literatures in Nigeria, Sénegal, Indonesia, Mozambique…
Another outcome of this is what Swedish literary scholar and critic Stefan Helgesson calls the dual crisis within literary studies: a crisis for the Eurocentric as well as the national paradigm. Helgesson talked at this year’s first Ørecomm Open Seminar on the subject World Literature? – Some alternatives for Transnational Literary Studies.
The resurrection in the last ten years of the concept World Literature, once coined by Goethe, does mark a paradigm shift. Major theoretical works by scholars such as Casanova (La République Mondiale des Lettres, 1999, eng. The World Republic of Letters, 2004), Franco Moretti (Graphs, Maps, Trees, 2005, and editor of Il Romanzo, vol. I-V, 2001 – 2003, eng. The Novel, vol. I and II, 2006) and David Damrosch (What is World Literature?, 2003) have been greatly influential in some sectors of the vast field.
Damrosch stresses the importance of reading and translation. Literature becomes world literature only in the moment it is translated to another context than the one of its conception. Moretti, whose focus is primarily on the global spread of the novel genre, sees literature as a world-encompassing system, quite similar to and as lopsided and unequal as the economic World System that economic historian Immanuel Wallerstein launched in the 1970s. In Casanova’s overview the literary history is described as a struggle between national literatures, with the French holding the hegemony – according to her – until quite recently. Both Moretti and Casanova thus apply a geo-political perspective, which in their analyses is translated to a corresponding geo-aesthetics. A recent contribution to this position is Danish scholar Mads Rosendahl Thomsen’s Mapping World Literature (2008), which proposes an internationalization of the literary canon.
Helgesson is obviously more sympathetic to Damrosch’s less pretentious approach, and he is critical of the way the world literature debate has evolved. ‘The World’ is not a perspective – except, perhaps, for extraterrestrials. The World Literature conception is in his view constricting and, when it comes to the crunch, still Eurocentric, with the Western literary canon at its core. And it could not be otherwise, since any universalist claim is made from a particular standpoint.
So, what is the alternative? Is there an alternative? The answer is affirmative, and Helgesson suggests transnational literary studies as a more open and productive concept and approach. In his brand new study Transnationalism in Southern African Literature (2009), he has followed the literary currents in Southern Africa in the decade after the Second World War, with Johannesburg, Luanda and Maputo as the centers, detecting subtle flows of influence between apparently very different publications such as South African popular magazine Drum and Mozambiquan literary journal Itinerario. Such transgressive perspectives are rare, not only in the region, where the the Eurocentric (colonial) standard has often been replaced by the national (nation-building) norm, but also at the departments of comparative literature and ‘post-colonial studies’ in the world literary metropolis.
How, then, does this apply to other fields than literature? I believe that the observations above apply in varying degrees to all the fine arts and to cultural studies in general. Transnational flows are among the key factors in the present global transformational processes. Yet both social sciences and humanities are still framed by the notion of the nation-state and a corollary national culture.
A specific area where the constraints of the national perspective are most limiting, yet hardly even reflected upon, is the field of international development cooperation. It is still largely organized at bilateral basis, government to government, while financial flows, remittances and, increasingly, non-governmental agencies, are transnational. Even the over-arching multilateral system of the United Nations is founded on this basic assumption of the nation-state and inter-national relations. Transnational is, in the minds of many, a suspect notion, associated with global capital flows and irresponsible transnational corporations. Transnational human flows (migration) is generally regarded as a problem, not a resource.
Thinking transnational is a formidable challenge, because our entire imagination is so conditioned by this national mindset. I am well aware that the word ‘our’ here may disclose a Eurocentric perspective. The notion of the nation differs in different contexts and thinking beyond it is certainly easier at hand in for example India or Latin America than in Europe. And as in literature, the impulses for renewal will most probably come from the margins, not the centre, of the alleged world system.
The notion of transnationalism is closely related to the concept of the glocal, and a true challenge for both research and practice in Communication for Development and Social Change. It is one of the strands of research that Ørecomm wishes to explore in the coming years. We welcome suggestions on collaborative projects and partnerships in this emerging field!
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