Goethe's Weltliteratur, and the cultural forms of globalization
Christopher Prendergast is Professor of Modern French Literature at
the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of King's College
Cambridge. He is the co-editor of World Reader, an anthology of
world literature.
Benedict Anderson is Aaron L. Binenkorp Professor of International
Studies Emeritus at Cornell University. He is editor of the journal
Indonesia and author of Java in a Time of Revolution, The Spectre
of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia, and the World and
Imagined Communities.
Emily Apter is Professor of Comparative Literature and French at
New York University. Her published works include The Translation
Zone: A New Comparative Literature and Continental Drift: From
National Characters to Subjects.
Stanley Corngold is Professor of German and Comparative Literature
at Princeton University. He is translator and editor of the Norton
Critical Edition of Metamorphosis, author of Lambent Traces: Franz
Kafka, Franz Kafka: The Necessity of Form, Complex Pleasure: Forms
of Feeling in German Literature, The Fate of the Self: German
Writers and French Theory, and Thomas Mann, 1875-1955. He is the
recipient of Literary Paternity, Literary Friendship: Essays in
Honor of Stanley Corngold.
Franco Moretti teaches English and Comparative Literature at
Columbia University. He is the author of Signs Taken for Wonders,
The Way of the World and Modern Epic, all from Verso.
Quite what Weltliteratur meant (to Goethe and his age) and what it
means (or might mean) to us are still very live issues, if only for
the reason that 'globalization', if it exits at all, is not a state
of a process, something still in the making. Goethe's idea was
itself cast in the form of a thought-experiment, a groping reach
for a barely glimpsed future. ... By the same token, what we make
of it today is necessarily open to indefinitely extended reflection
and debate.
*Christopher Prendergast*
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