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Worlding a Peripheral
Literature
Marko Juvan
Canon and World Literature
Series Editor
Zhang Longxi
City University of Hong Kong
Kowloon, Hong Kong
World literature is indeed the most exciting new phenomenon in literary
studies today. It is on the rise as the economic, political, and demographic
relationships and balances are changing rapidly in a globalized world.
A new concept of world literature is responding to such changes and is
advocating a more inclusive and truly global conceptualization of canonical
literature in the world’s different literary and cultural traditions. With a
number of anthologies, monographs, companions, and handbooks already
published and available, there is a real need to have a book series that
convey to interested readers what the new concept of world literature is or
should be. To put it clearly, world literature is not and cannot be the
simple conglomeration of all the literary works written in the world, but
only the very best works from the world’s different literatures, particularly
literary traditions that have not been well studied beyond their native
environment. That is to say, world literature still needs to establish its
canon by including great works of literature not just from the major
traditions of Western Europe, but also literary traditions in other parts of
the world as well as the “minor” or insufficiently studied literatures in
Europe and North America.
Worlding a Peripheral
Literature
Marko Juvan
Research Center of the Slovenian
Academy of Sciences and Arts
Ljubljana, Slovenia
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer
Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019
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Acknowledgments
v
vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
1 Introduction 1
Works Cited257
Index277
vii
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
In his private notes, written during the fascist repression of the Slovenian
minority in Italy, the Slovenian writer Vladimir Bartol (1903–1967), who
was compelled to leave his native Trieste and flee across the Italian border
to Ljubljana in his youth, boldly considered his novel Alamut (1938) a
potential global hit (see Košuta 1988: 554, 1991). In fact, the text gives
the impression that it was conceived to become an international bestseller,
in precisely the style that Rebecca Walkowitz defines as “born translated”
(Walkowitz 2015: 3–4). It uses an easily translatable style, draws on
Orientalist historical knowledge, sets the story in exotic eleventh-century
Iran, displays erudition, clings to successful genre patterns, creates sus-
pense, and addresses big issues of totalitarianism, dictatorship, terrorism,
and conspiracy theory. In the very year of its first publication in Slovenian,
Bartol tried to offer his novel to the global cultural market. He submitted
a screenplay about Alamut Castle directly to the Hollywood film metropo-
lis, but MGM studios rejected it. Fifty years later, Alamut nevertheless
began to gain worldwide popularity. It has been translated into almost
twenty languages, including English (Bartol 2004). In 2007, the plot and
idea of Bartol’s Orientalist novel even inspired the popular series of video
games Assassin’s Creed, and the Slovenian newspaper Delo reported on 22
February 2013, that the French film director and scriptwriter Guillaume
Martinez was enthusiastically planning to screen Alamut and make an
international hit out of it. Alamut’s success story remains unfinished; it
still has not been adapted for film. As a matter of fact, Bartol’s entrance
and Europe alike. In other words, the idea of world literature was instru-
mental not only in rectifying Goethe’s intercultural intertextuality and his
social networking in the international respublica litterarum but also in his
self-canonizing efforts to become a German classic. He aimed to assume
the role of a nation-founding author whose classical universality would
simultaneously transcend nationalist parochialism and represent the
authority central to European literary life. Evidently, he wanted to help
German letters—which he held as backward in comparison to renowned
Western literatures—achieve international recognition on the purportedly
universal basis of humanism and the aesthetic mode of cultural consump-
tion. Such ambitions that surfaced in the context of the nineteenth-cen-
tury European national movements seem to be at odds with Goethe’s
canonical position in world literature today and with the current centrality
of Germany in the European core of the world-system. Hence, Goethe’s
enormous lifetime success and posthumous canonicity obliterated the par-
ticularly semi-peripheral and nationalist subtext of the presumed univer-
sality implied in his influential notion of world literature.
In comparison with existing narratives on world literature featuring
Goethe, I would instead call attention to his role in the nineteenth-century
nexus of national and world literatures. As I corroborate in this book,
Goethe exemplifies the authorial function of a nation-representing author
from a (semi-)periphery whose canonicity establishes a symbolic link
between national and world literatures as interdependent entities. Having
explored the asymmetrical relations between a peripheral literary field and
the world literary system, I go on to show how a marginal perspective on
the original Goethean nexus of national and world literatures influenced
the emergence and development of one of the internationally least studied
East-Central European peripheries: Slovenian literature.1
The central figure of my theorizing on the nexus of national and world
literature in peripheral Romanticism is the Slovenian national poet France
Prešeren (1800–1849).2 He was born as the third of eight children to a
respected Upper Carniolan peasant family. His mother was literate, knew
1
In addition to a detailed history of the term “world literature,” the discussion of recent
concepts of world literature, in particular the world-systems analysis, the links between the
formation of Slovenian literature and the world literary spaces was the main topic of my
monograph in Slovenian Prešernovska struktura in svetovni literarni sistem (The Prešernian
Structure and the World Literary System; Juvan 2012a; for a review, see Tutek 2013).
2
The following biography of Prešeren is adapted from my encyclopedic entry (Juvan
2018). See also Slodnjak 1952, 1964.
4 M. JUVAN
language for correspondence, poems (e.g., the elegy Dem Andenken des
Matthias Č op, To the Memory of Matija Č op, 1835), or translations (e.g.,
Mickiewicz’s sonnet Rezygnacja, Resignation). Although his poetry is
typically Romantic in its themes and genres, it also includes occasional
songs and satirical, humorous, folkloric, jovial, or Anacreontic verse. His
most celebrated work from the 1830s—ballads, Spanish romances, ele-
gies, sonnets, ghazels, and a verse tale—are marked by classicist imagery,
neo-Petrarchism, and reliance on earlier literary models. This universalist,
historicist, and classicist quality, which is also recognizable in his transla-
tions of Bürger and Byron, came to Prešeren by way of his erudite friend,
the philologist and aesthetician Č op. Prešeren’s work circulated through
oral recitation, in manuscripts, leaflets, and pamphlets, as well as in printed
form for a wider public (e.g., in the almanac Krajnska čbelica, in the liter-
ary supplement to the newspaper Laibacher Zeitung entitled Illyrisches
Blatt, and the weekly Novice). His publishing involved many clashes with
the censorship of the Metternich years. Kopitar, the imperial censor for
Slavic publications, became the harshest opponent of Prešeren’s circle.
Prešeren’s first printed book, the historical verse tale Krst pri Savici (The
Baptism on the Savica, 1836) appeared in 600 copies.
During his lifetime, Prešeren was already recognized as an outstanding
figure by various Slovenian, German, and Slavic critics in the Habsburg
Empire, even though his poetry was not fully understood. His role in
Slovenian literary life was underappreciated owing to his slightly bohemian
lifestyle and the fact that his poetry was considered objectionably amorous
and sentimental. His canonization as the Slovenian “national poet,” equal
to masters of world literature, began with the 1866 edition of his poems
by the circle of more radical liberal Young Slovenians. The centenary of
Prešeren’s birth was already a national celebration. His monument was
raised in the center of Ljubljana in 1905. In 1944, the Partisan resistance
movement proclaimed Prešeren Day a national holiday. It was celebrated
not only in communist Yugoslavia but since 1991 also continues to be
celebrated in Slovenia today. Since the German book translations of the
1860s, his major works have been translated into several other languages.
Having briefly presented Prešeren, the protagonist of my narrative, I
now introduce the structure, arguments, and basic concepts of this book.
As I have presented in more detail elsewhere (Juvan 2011: 73–86,
2013), the recent renaissance of Goethean Weltliteratur is a symptom of
sociopolitical shifts of literary studies in the context of globalization and
the crisis of late capitalism. As adopted in the current comparative
6 M. JUVAN
has reflected and ideologically steered the global development and under-
standing of transnational literary practices. As it is known, Goethe discussed
world literature in about twenty sketchy formulations scattered over his
public lectures, review articles from his Kunst und Altertum, talks with his
secretary Johann Peter Eckermann, and extensive personal communication
with intellectuals of European respublica litterarum (Goethe 1949, 1963:
351–352, 361–364, 1973; Eckermann 1998: 164–167). Goethe’s ideas
became fairly lively debated by British, Italian, and French literary journals
during the last years of his life (see D’haen 2012: 5–9; Koch 2002: 19,
231–233; Pizer 2006: 3, 21, 83). This early, short-lived exchange, how-
ever, engendered a long-lasting transnational meta-discourse on world lit-
erature, which, functioning as an autopoietic recursive loop, both reflected
and fostered localized practices of global literary processes, such as “biblio-
migrancy” (see Mani 2012), translation, interliterary intertextualities, and
transnational canonization. Goethe’s utterances initiating this discourse
responded to contradictory aspects of his experience of a “national” (i.e.,
German) author who gained a broader “international” reputation (see
Pizer 2006: 18–46; Strich 1949: 32–51).
Indeed, the historical moment of Goethe’s introduction of world litera-
ture meta-discourse and the periods of its conjuncture coincide with cycles
of world capitalism from the industrial revolution to the present global
dead-end of late capitalism. In the nineteenth century, the international
book market and copyright fundamentally changed the social position of
writers. Authors began to be evaluated according to their success in book
sales, their symbolic capital, and increasingly also by their international
profile. It is within this reconfiguring of the author function that Goethe’s
idea took shape (see Juvan 2012a: 87–89, 112–117). The next two major
global turning points in the functioning of the literary field are associated
with further conjunctures of the world literature discourse. In the after-
math of the major economic depression and WWII, Strich, with his cos-
mopolitan liberal humanism, undertook the first resounding revival of
Weltliteratur, while since the turn of the millennium, coinciding with the
end of the American cycle and the crisis of world capitalism, we are wit-
nessing a renaissance of this concept in Pascale Casanova, Franco Moretti,
David Damrosch, John Pizer, Mads Rosendahl Thomsen, Theo D’haen,
and others. Triggered by Moretti’s controversial and lucid 2000 essay, the
concept of world literature has evolved from a denomination of a research
field to a “new critical method” (Moretti 2000: 55), moreover, to a new
“paradigm” of literary studies (D’haen 2012: 1; Thomsen 2008: 5–32).
8 M. JUVAN
of cultural goods with the capitalist world market (Casanova 2004: 12–14;
Koch 2002: 2, 17; Strich 1949: 31). Literature was going global because
of the exposure to the capitalist mode of production and the accelerated
development of communication technologies. It was above all this new
social reality of the post-Enlightenment literary discourse that was
reflected, given sense, and even programmed by a meta-discourse on
world literature inaugurated by Goethe.
It has been repeatedly stressed that Goethe, with his aristocratic-
cosmopolitan humanism, expected world literature to encourage the
renewal of every national literature and to create a space in which smaller,
peripheral, or non-European literatures could establish themselves on an
equal basis (see, e.g., Strich 1949: 32–36, 45–48). For Goethe, the open-
ing world literary space allowed national literature to assert itself interna-
tionally, without feeling hampered by the dominance either of the canon
of the Antiquity or major literatures that had been established and widely
recognized since early modernity. Even national literature that appeared to
be dependent on and lagging behind major literatures of the European
West could now prove to be an original producer, a competent translator,
and a central mediator of cross-literary traffic. To be sure, Goethe was
thinking primarily of German national literature. Through his self-con-
scious networking within the European republic of letters, Goethe
attempted to promote Weimar not only to make of it the cohesive intel-
lectual center of politically disjointed and backward Germany but also as a
hub of the nascent world literary system at large.
A necessary condition for the worldwide assertion of the national litera-
ture is, however, that it renounces parochial self-sufficiency. As epitomized
by his intertextual dialogue with Hafez in West-östlicher Divan, in which
he represents his subjectivity through Orientalist otherness, Goethe was
persistently attempting to avoid subjectivist arbitrariness and, by refracting
his experience through foreign forms and themes, achieve the status of a
“classical national author” (klassicher Nationalautor), comparable to
British, French, and Italian writers of European fame (Goethe 1963:
240–242; Strich 1949: 45–47). Goethe advised every literature to make
use of literary patterns from other parts of the world and recognize within
the foreign elements a different individualization of the “generally
human”; thus individual national literatures build up universality through
their active exchange (see Eckermann 1998: 164–167). According to
Goethe, the aesthetic perception of works from foreign languages and
distant civilizations enabled the self-reflection of the modern European
10 M. JUVAN
In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have
intercourse in every direction, universal interdependence of nations. And as
in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of
individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and
narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from numer-
ous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature. The bour-
geoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the
immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most
barbarian, nations into civilization. … It compels all nations, on pain of
extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production … In one word, it
creates a world after its own image. (Marx and Engels 1998: 39)
World literature is, then, according to Goethe, the literature which serves as
a link between national literatures and thus between the nations themselves,
for the exchange of ideal values. Such literature includes all writings by
means of which the peoples learn to understand and make allowances for
each other, and which bring them more closely together. It is a literary
bridge over dividing rivers, a spiritual highway over dividing mountains. It
is an intellectual barter, a traffic in ideas between peoples, a literary market
to which the nations bring their intellectual treasures for exchange. … It is
an international conversation, an intellectual interest in each other. (Strich
1949: 5; emphases added)
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