Cosmpolitan and Vernacular Dynamics in World Literatures
This research programme will explore, on a planetary scale, how aesthetic values, genres, forms, literary communities and individual authorships are shaped in a trade-off between the local and the global, between the national and the international, between hegemonic and dominated languages, between the North and the South, the East and the West, and the South and the South. Focusing on such productive tensions between cosmopolitan and vernacular tendencies, the 26 sub-projects will also investigate how literature can advance the critical understanding of cosmopolitanism - historically, and in our contemporary moment shaped by globalisation, resurgent nationalisms, regionalisms, and racisms. Research questions cluster around translation and circulation, literary history, migration, multilingualism, and the "world-making" capacity of literature. Methodologically, it will engage with world literature studies, critical theory, postcolonial studies, book history, translation studies, and anthropology.
Final report
The research programme “Cosmopolitan and Vernacular Dynamics in World Literatures”
(M15-0343:1) aimed at contributing to the ongoing elaboration of world literature as a methodological paradigm. We approached our task by way of four distinct yet connected areas of inquiry: language, translation, geography (or place) and aesthetic and social world-making. Besides four major volumes devoted to these matters, the programme resulted in more than a hundred scholarly publications comprising articles, special issues, edited volumes and a wide range of monographs. In addition, we have published a large number of popularly oriented essays and articles. The following brief account will first provide a backdrop to our research initiative, and then outline some of its main findings.
It was around the turn of the millennium that the debates relating to the concept ”world literature” took off. The term as such was old, but the circumstances were new. After 1989 the world experienced a period of accelerating exchanges among countries. The dissolution of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, in combination with a neoliberal market ideology, increased mobility and new communication technologies resulted in a proliferation of transnational and translingual contacts. In the social sciences, “globalisation” became a key concept. The revival of world literature must therefore be understood in relation to this development, but as a response that was grounded in the humanities.
Historically, world literature – or Weltliteratur in German – is normally linked to the ageing Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s various comments on the matter. In the 1820s, a changed Europe was emerging in the wake of the Napoleonic wars – a continent of nation-states. For Goethe, Weltliteratur served as a counter-weight to the fragmentation and self-centredness that nationalism could result in. Goethe’s vague understanding of world literature would prevail through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
When the term was revived around the turn of the millennium, this was done in a more theoretically stringent spirit. David Damrosch answered his own question in What Is World Literature? (2003) with a pragmatic definition: world literature is nothing more nor less than literary texts that circulate beyond their culture of origin. In her La République mondiale des lettres (1999; The World Republic of Letters, 2004) Pascale Casanova devised a theoretical framework that could explain how certain authors gain international recognition and even an apparently universal aesthetic legitimacy. Franco Moretti, the third name often mentioned, chose instead to focus on the global dissemination of the novel genre. Rather than investigate already recognised and successful authors, he elaborated a quantitative approach to world literature. What do we know even about British or French literature? Moretti asked rhetorically. Perhaps 50,000 novels were published in England in the nineteenth century – and no one will ever read them all. If we then move up a level to study world literature, Moretti argued, reading will no longer serve as an appropriate method. This led him to coin the term distant reading. Instead of reading a few works qualitatively, the distant reader would collate the results of other studies on different parts of the world, thereby mapping centre and periphery in a world-encompassing literary system.
When the idea for the cosmopolitan and vernacular research programme took shape, the scholarly debates had been in full swing for some time. Of note was that postcolonial scholars criticised what they considered to be world literature’s European bias. According to Gayatri Spivak (2012), the combination of a global outlook with an attachment to the Western concept “literature” resulted in a methodological Eurocentrism. “Europe” served in this way as “a guide to disciplinary objectivity”, notwithstanding that literature and authorship in the European sense are historically specific terms that fail, for example, to account for oral forms of verbal art. Along similar lines, these critics claimed, the world literary perspective resulted in a skewed conception of literatures of the world, given its tendency tautologically to highlight literature that had already “made it”. A widely discussed critique of the tendency to privilege already translated literature was articulated by Emily Apter (2013), who rallied instead to the defence of the “Untranslatable”.
This, then, is where we can locate a primary motivation for our research programme. On the one hand, we embraced the border-transgressing tendency of world literature and its attendant challenge to methodological nationalism. Our hypothesis, articulated from our Nordic vantage point, was that it had become increasingly irrelevant to reduce the study of literature in Sweden to Western and national-linguistic contexts, regardless of the methodological challenges that accompany a broadening of the field of knowledge. But on the other hand, rather than focus only on authors that circulate in the major languages and systems of publication, we suggested that world literature is best conceived in terms of a dynamic between local and global trajectories – or, to use our vocabulary, a cosmopolitan-vernacular dynamic. What does this mean?
The word vernacular derives from “verna” (slave) och “culus” (home) in Latin, denoting a domestic slave. Hence, the vernacular has been seen as the language of the popular classes.
In the Romantic era in Europe, there was a strong conviction that vernacular literature emerged organically from spoken language, an idea that, in turn, nurtured the growth of national literatures. According to the German Romantics, authentic literature could only be written in one’s mother tongue. Contemporary scholars such as Sheldon Pollock and Alexander Beecroft – who also work on Asian literatures – have however argued that vernacular literatures never flourish spontaneously. There needs, on the contrary, to be political and social preconditions that facilitate such a development. When English, Spanish and French became viable literary languages in the Renaissance, this was supported by the monarchy in resistance to the cosmopolitan language of that era, Latin. And yet, vernacular apologists in the sixteenth century such as Joachim du Bellay and Philip Sidney drew heavily on the classical Latin and Greek heritage. In other words: vernacular literature emerges in dynamic interaction with the comsopolitan tradition. And if we turn this around, it becomes just as evident that cosmopolitan literatures – in our days above all anglophone literature – evolves through vernacular practices.
The cosmopolitan-vernacular hypothesis was thereby an attempt to synthesise current approaches to world literature. But how did we make these ideas operable? We focused, to begin with, on literature from the last two centuries and combined methods from intellectual history, anthropology and literary studies. The research tasks were then divided among four sub-groups.
A key result from the group focusing on language, whose method could be described as historical contextualisation, was the evident adaptability of the vernacular, as well as its highly variable aesthetic and ideological valency. Contrary to the simplified conception of vernacularity as an organic force emerging from below, the studies in their volume show how in multilingual Spain, in Chinese twentieth-century literature, or in vernacular writing from India, the Antilles and Africa, there is a fluid range of diverse vernacular relations to cosmopolitan as well as national values.
The translation group focused on Sweden as a translation field, but also on the fate of Swedish-language literature in translation. With an adapted system-theory (see Casanova and Moretti above) the group hypothesised that Sweden should be considered a “semi-periphery” in the global exchangs among literary cultures. A crucial result here is that Sweden has, relatively speaking, become more closed as a translation field – but also stronger in the Nordic context – while their agent-oriented studies have also shown the extent to which individual publishers and translators are able to intervene in the field in ways that contradict the assumptions of system analysis.
The group that investigated places in literature mainly used literary interpretation as its method, but organised its analyses by way of the polarity between location and orientation, specifying in this way the cosmopolitan-vernacular dynamic as an immanently textual phenomenon. At the same time, when dealing with literature from the Caribbean, southern Africa, India, Hawai‘i and elsewhere, this group elaborated anthropological approaches to literature, making use of interviews and field methods.
The group focusing on world-making, finally, combined textual interpretation and contextualisation (often with a materialist bent) to demonstrate the capacity of literary practice, manifested through different genres and material forms, to build a world-belongingness (as well as cosmopolitan world imaginaries) within given locations. Literary journals, scrapbooks, travelogues and novels were among the forms investigated – within a geographical range that included southern Africa, India, Western Europe, Russia, Turkey and the USA. Here, too, anthropological approaches to literary practices were foregrounded.
In sum, the research output of “Cosmopolitan and Vernacular Dynamics in Worlds Literatures” has resulted in significant elaborations of theory and method in the field. In addition, our publications present a wealth of empirical material that may the serve as the basis for future research.
(M15-0343:1) aimed at contributing to the ongoing elaboration of world literature as a methodological paradigm. We approached our task by way of four distinct yet connected areas of inquiry: language, translation, geography (or place) and aesthetic and social world-making. Besides four major volumes devoted to these matters, the programme resulted in more than a hundred scholarly publications comprising articles, special issues, edited volumes and a wide range of monographs. In addition, we have published a large number of popularly oriented essays and articles. The following brief account will first provide a backdrop to our research initiative, and then outline some of its main findings.
It was around the turn of the millennium that the debates relating to the concept ”world literature” took off. The term as such was old, but the circumstances were new. After 1989 the world experienced a period of accelerating exchanges among countries. The dissolution of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, in combination with a neoliberal market ideology, increased mobility and new communication technologies resulted in a proliferation of transnational and translingual contacts. In the social sciences, “globalisation” became a key concept. The revival of world literature must therefore be understood in relation to this development, but as a response that was grounded in the humanities.
Historically, world literature – or Weltliteratur in German – is normally linked to the ageing Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s various comments on the matter. In the 1820s, a changed Europe was emerging in the wake of the Napoleonic wars – a continent of nation-states. For Goethe, Weltliteratur served as a counter-weight to the fragmentation and self-centredness that nationalism could result in. Goethe’s vague understanding of world literature would prevail through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
When the term was revived around the turn of the millennium, this was done in a more theoretically stringent spirit. David Damrosch answered his own question in What Is World Literature? (2003) with a pragmatic definition: world literature is nothing more nor less than literary texts that circulate beyond their culture of origin. In her La République mondiale des lettres (1999; The World Republic of Letters, 2004) Pascale Casanova devised a theoretical framework that could explain how certain authors gain international recognition and even an apparently universal aesthetic legitimacy. Franco Moretti, the third name often mentioned, chose instead to focus on the global dissemination of the novel genre. Rather than investigate already recognised and successful authors, he elaborated a quantitative approach to world literature. What do we know even about British or French literature? Moretti asked rhetorically. Perhaps 50,000 novels were published in England in the nineteenth century – and no one will ever read them all. If we then move up a level to study world literature, Moretti argued, reading will no longer serve as an appropriate method. This led him to coin the term distant reading. Instead of reading a few works qualitatively, the distant reader would collate the results of other studies on different parts of the world, thereby mapping centre and periphery in a world-encompassing literary system.
When the idea for the cosmopolitan and vernacular research programme took shape, the scholarly debates had been in full swing for some time. Of note was that postcolonial scholars criticised what they considered to be world literature’s European bias. According to Gayatri Spivak (2012), the combination of a global outlook with an attachment to the Western concept “literature” resulted in a methodological Eurocentrism. “Europe” served in this way as “a guide to disciplinary objectivity”, notwithstanding that literature and authorship in the European sense are historically specific terms that fail, for example, to account for oral forms of verbal art. Along similar lines, these critics claimed, the world literary perspective resulted in a skewed conception of literatures of the world, given its tendency tautologically to highlight literature that had already “made it”. A widely discussed critique of the tendency to privilege already translated literature was articulated by Emily Apter (2013), who rallied instead to the defence of the “Untranslatable”.
This, then, is where we can locate a primary motivation for our research programme. On the one hand, we embraced the border-transgressing tendency of world literature and its attendant challenge to methodological nationalism. Our hypothesis, articulated from our Nordic vantage point, was that it had become increasingly irrelevant to reduce the study of literature in Sweden to Western and national-linguistic contexts, regardless of the methodological challenges that accompany a broadening of the field of knowledge. But on the other hand, rather than focus only on authors that circulate in the major languages and systems of publication, we suggested that world literature is best conceived in terms of a dynamic between local and global trajectories – or, to use our vocabulary, a cosmopolitan-vernacular dynamic. What does this mean?
The word vernacular derives from “verna” (slave) och “culus” (home) in Latin, denoting a domestic slave. Hence, the vernacular has been seen as the language of the popular classes.
In the Romantic era in Europe, there was a strong conviction that vernacular literature emerged organically from spoken language, an idea that, in turn, nurtured the growth of national literatures. According to the German Romantics, authentic literature could only be written in one’s mother tongue. Contemporary scholars such as Sheldon Pollock and Alexander Beecroft – who also work on Asian literatures – have however argued that vernacular literatures never flourish spontaneously. There needs, on the contrary, to be political and social preconditions that facilitate such a development. When English, Spanish and French became viable literary languages in the Renaissance, this was supported by the monarchy in resistance to the cosmopolitan language of that era, Latin. And yet, vernacular apologists in the sixteenth century such as Joachim du Bellay and Philip Sidney drew heavily on the classical Latin and Greek heritage. In other words: vernacular literature emerges in dynamic interaction with the comsopolitan tradition. And if we turn this around, it becomes just as evident that cosmopolitan literatures – in our days above all anglophone literature – evolves through vernacular practices.
The cosmopolitan-vernacular hypothesis was thereby an attempt to synthesise current approaches to world literature. But how did we make these ideas operable? We focused, to begin with, on literature from the last two centuries and combined methods from intellectual history, anthropology and literary studies. The research tasks were then divided among four sub-groups.
A key result from the group focusing on language, whose method could be described as historical contextualisation, was the evident adaptability of the vernacular, as well as its highly variable aesthetic and ideological valency. Contrary to the simplified conception of vernacularity as an organic force emerging from below, the studies in their volume show how in multilingual Spain, in Chinese twentieth-century literature, or in vernacular writing from India, the Antilles and Africa, there is a fluid range of diverse vernacular relations to cosmopolitan as well as national values.
The translation group focused on Sweden as a translation field, but also on the fate of Swedish-language literature in translation. With an adapted system-theory (see Casanova and Moretti above) the group hypothesised that Sweden should be considered a “semi-periphery” in the global exchangs among literary cultures. A crucial result here is that Sweden has, relatively speaking, become more closed as a translation field – but also stronger in the Nordic context – while their agent-oriented studies have also shown the extent to which individual publishers and translators are able to intervene in the field in ways that contradict the assumptions of system analysis.
The group that investigated places in literature mainly used literary interpretation as its method, but organised its analyses by way of the polarity between location and orientation, specifying in this way the cosmopolitan-vernacular dynamic as an immanently textual phenomenon. At the same time, when dealing with literature from the Caribbean, southern Africa, India, Hawai‘i and elsewhere, this group elaborated anthropological approaches to literature, making use of interviews and field methods.
The group focusing on world-making, finally, combined textual interpretation and contextualisation (often with a materialist bent) to demonstrate the capacity of literary practice, manifested through different genres and material forms, to build a world-belongingness (as well as cosmopolitan world imaginaries) within given locations. Literary journals, scrapbooks, travelogues and novels were among the forms investigated – within a geographical range that included southern Africa, India, Western Europe, Russia, Turkey and the USA. Here, too, anthropological approaches to literary practices were foregrounded.
In sum, the research output of “Cosmopolitan and Vernacular Dynamics in Worlds Literatures” has resulted in significant elaborations of theory and method in the field. In addition, our publications present a wealth of empirical material that may the serve as the basis for future research.