Conjectures on world literature
'Nowadays, national literature doesn't mean much: the age of world literature is beginning, and everybody should contribute to hasten its advent. This was Goethe, of course, talking to Eckermann in 1827; and these are Marx and Engels, twenty years later, in 1848: 'National one sidedness and narrow mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the many national and local literatures, a world literature arises. Weltliteratur: this is what Goethe and Marx have in mind. Not 'comparative' but world literature: the Chinese novel that Goethe was reading at the time of that exchange, or the bourgeoisie of the Manifesto, which has 'given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country' Well, let me put it very simply: comparative literature has not lived up to these beginnings. It's been a much more modest intellectual enterprise, fundamentally limited t o Western Europe, and mostly revolving around the river Rhine (German philologists working on French literature) Not much more.