Summary
Goethe’s idea, very important to professional scholars of comparative literature in the early twentieth century, which Edward Said shows was in practice organized as a hierarchy with Europe and its Latin Christian literatures at its center and top (Culture and Imperialism, PDF p.72 / printed p.45).
Details
- The concept waffled between the notion of “great books” and a vague synthesis of all the world’s literatures, but its practical meaning and operating ideology were that, so far as literature and culture were concerned, Europe led the way and was the main subject of interest; Romania underpins Europe and provides the center for the enormous grouping of literatures produced worldwide (PDF p.72 / printed p.45).
- The genuinely profound scholarship of those who believed in and practiced Weltliteratur implied the extraordinary privilege of an observer located in the West who could survey the world’s literary output with a kind of sovereign detachment — a power that often went hand in glove with a consciously undertaken imperial enterprise (PDF p.75 / printed p.48).
- The comparatist “world literature” scheme was fuelled by an idealist historicism matching the concretely imperial world map of the same moment: both are elaborations of power (PDF p.75 / printed p.48).
Related pages
Culture and Imperialism, Erich Auerbach, Contrapuntalism, Imperialism