Comparing Modern Literatures Worldwide: The Transamerican View

Author(s): Ramón Saldívar

Source: Comparative Literature Studies, Vol. 50, No. 2 (2013), pp. 199-203
Published by: Penn State University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/complitstudies.50.2.0199
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 comparing modern literatures worldwide:
the transamerican view

Ramón Saldívar
In the 2011 issue of the MLA’s Profession, David Porter notes that, following
Goethe’s call for a new age of Weltliteratur in the early nineteenth century,
since the mid-1990s the notion of “world literature” has reemerged “as the
most promising rubric for imagining a major paradigm shift in the study and
teaching of literature and for thinking beyond the dead ends of traditional
comparative study.”1
While no consensus has been reached on what it might mean, this
recent reemergence of the notion of world literature has become a focus for
debate over new possibilities implicit in the idea of global literatures. Porter
cites in particular three noteworthy avenues for critical discussion: David
Damrosch’s What Is World Literature?, Pascale Casanova’s The World Republic
of Letters, and Franco Moretti’s Graphs, Maps, Trees. Like other contributors
to this forum, I find these three works particularly suggestive of the current
state of thinking concerning comparative literary studies.
In What is World Literature?, Damrosch develops a framework for world
literature that is cosmopolitan in terms of a multiplicity not of origins but
of trajectories. That is, world literatures are literatures that circulate beyond
their cultures of origin and in doing so have an effect on other cultures
beyond the linguistic and institutional borders circumscribed by overtly
national literatures.2
Casanova offers in The World Republic of Letters a sociological account
of the world of literature as a rule-bound, hierarchical formation. The
“world republic of letters,” she argues, is not the open, liberal, democratic
marketplace of ideas but a “rigidly stratified social structure where access to
broad markets is tightly controlled by a powerful caste of critics, publishers,
and translators, whose authority is legitimized through their association

comparative literature studies, vol. 50, no. 2, 2013.

Copyright © 2013 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA.

199

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 200 c o mpa r ati v e lit e r atu r e studi e s

with recognized literary centers such as Paris or New York.”3 This caste of
gatekeepers functions across political and linguistic lines and helps create a
body of literary works that share metropolitan features, even when they come
from outside French or English, the traditional sites of “world literature.”
In Graphs, Maps, Trees, Moretti also takes literary circulation and trans-
formation as his starting point but offers a set of more radical methodological
alternatives—drawing as models for literary analysis “graphs from quantita-
tive history, maps from geography, and trees from evolutionary theory”—in
proposing that literary scholars rethink their dependence on close reading.4
“Distant reading,” distance being understood as “a specific form of knowledge,”
reveals what close reading cannot.5 As Porter rightly notes, this attention
to the macroscopic patterns and processes that shape the literary landscape
works on scales beyond individual texts and authors, and its most obvious
benefit is that it includes the 99 percent of literary production typically
excluded by any canon from visibility and relevance.6
Porter concludes from his survey of the return of “world literature” that
what Damrosch, Casanova, and Moretti share is a concept of world litera-
ture that “stresses the mobility of texts and the permeability of traditions.”7
Each makes clear that world literature is not the sum of national literatures
“but rather a dynamic model of . . . a constantly shifting field of circulation,
transmutation, and contestation.”8 This conclusion is of central concern:
what might a field of comparative studies that was not based on national
literatures, or even singular canonic examples, look like? How would such
a field be organized? And is the MLA structure, indeed any institutional
structure, adequate to the study of transnational literary formations?
As a scholar who has learned from and adapted these observations to
my own main area of comparative study, the hemispheric Americas, I think
that the work of this group of literary historians helps us reconsider what
Porter identifies as the “relation between the processes of differentiation
and diffusion that govern the spread and regeneration of literary forms in a
global literary space.”9 In that context, probably the first observation worth
making is that a new vocabulary for naming, studying, and comparing the
hemispheric Americas and their literatures has emerged over the past twenty
years, representing a battery of interesting alternatives to be considered. With
the emergence of other approaches, such as diasporic studies, comparative
studies in race and ethnicity, studies in globalization and the global South,
and the transnational turn in cultural studies, coupled with the resurgence
of the very idea of world literature itself, the fundamental terms of analysis
and description in the context of contemporary comparative literary study
deserve highlighting.

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 T H E T R A N S A M ER I C A N V I E W 201

Globalization and the vision of the globe implied by that contemporary

term of everyday discourse do not just belong to the neocons, neoliberals,
or end-of-history triumphalists. The “world” of “world literature” and of
diverse cultural studies and changing disciplinary practices is also becoming
globalized and “worlded” in a Heideggerian sense that denotes how things
become intelligible to human beings by virtue of being part of an interpreted
and structured context of meaning.10 This “worlding” of world literature
produces alternative expressions of what can count and mean as “literature”
that are every bit as powerful as critical terms as the former vocabularies
of ideological analysis. These terms emphasize the public impact of the
emergence of global systems from disparate critical angles of vision, multiple
frameworks, social situations, and knowledge/power field practices that are,
as yet, emerging, fluid, and undertheorized. The point of these critical angles
of vision is not simply hermeneutical. More powerfully, they carry out social
analyses of contemporary ruling structures with the end of formulating the
possibility of social justice.
The transdisciplinary practices, transnational literacies, and multisited
interventions that globalization and the idea of world literature projects
require help us envision and shape keener expressions of what contemporary
differential, transnational, and borderlands projects can and must do now,
moving beyond the postmodern/postcolonial formulations of “comparative
world literatures.” What is crucial in all of these formulations is the sense that
no process of worlding or globalization is anywhere near over and done with
as a historical process of world formation. So how are we going to talk about
it even as it continues to change before our very eyes? The goal of programs
of study based in attempts to reformulate the goals of comparative literature
and comparative cultural studies generally is one of turning emergent forms of
theorizing and cultural activist writing into new cultural poetics adequate to
dealing with new world realities. I take this project to coincide with the one that
Gayatri Spivak described recently as one of “translation”—that is, as a process
of poiesis that is not mere imitation of an original but an imaginative creation
in another mode, situated in the very differential between copy and original.11
Current debates on the meaning of citizenship have refocused attention
away from notions of civil rights that depend on the existence of a social
contract within the framework of the nation-state and toward ways in which
the processes of decolonization and migration, as well as social identities
based on ethnicity, race, and sexuality, point to the existence of identities other
than national ones for defining citizenship. They offer a direct challenge to
the traditional language of citizenship and liberal democratic notions that
tie citizenship and liberal democratic rights indissolubly to state affiliation.

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 202 c o mpa r ati v e lit e r atu r e studi e s

So, what happens when we move the discussion of citizenship and

“rights” away from the idea of the nation state, not toward a mythic postna-
tional state but instead to the realm of the transnation? The fictive entities
with subject status that we call corporations have worked imaginatively
­precisely to create a sense of those transnational rights. One powerful function
of aesthetic education in the age of globalization might be then to teach us
how to conceive of transnational rights for individual and collective bodies of
subjects, represented most saliently by the participants in the massive labor
diasporas from south to north in the last decades of the twentieth century.
This is the actively creative act of poiesis in translation that Spivak refers to
in regard to a rethinking of comparativism, a process that she describes as
“an active practice.”12
This concern for the active practice of translation as an act of re-creation
is acutely visible in the area of comparative work, which is my own—the
transnational literatures of the Americas. These literatures, represented
most powerfully by such works as Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of
Oscar Wao and Salvador Plascencia’s The People of Paper, typically draw not
only from the grand traditions of the various American national literatures
but also from the traditions of vernacular narrative, popular culture, and
the literary avant-garde.13 They do so for several reasons, one of which is to
show the constant and complete dissonance between the redemptive course
of the history of the Americas with its origins in conquest and the psychic
façades that bar the way to memories of the traumatic past of the Americas.
These are issues I have elaborated more fully in other work.14 In this con-
text, it is worth noting that in Plascencia’s and Díaz’s writings, as in those of
a whole generational cohort of contemporary writers from the transnational
American global South, neither literary realism, nor modernist estrangement,
nor postmodern play, nor magical realist wonder alone can suffice as formal
stand-ins for the concrete content of justice. The representation of social
justice is not and should not be taken to be the same thing as its felicitous
performance. How, then, can one possibly conceive of a narrativity to still the
chaos unleashed by modern political terror? How to create ethnic romance
from consciousness colonized by self-hate and self-doubt? What would a
literature of political and racial romance, sensation, gothic, marvels, fantasy,
and absolute otherness appropriate to transporting us to the margins of the
imaginary and the symbolic accomplish that earlier forms of U.S. ethnic
literature have not? What would its referential world look like? And most
significantly, what could it accomplish as a symbolic representation of real
history? In the works of transnational American writers, the representation
of social justice requires a new and different formal medium incorporating
states of fantasy that occupy and override previous attempts to represent

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 T H E T R A N S A M ER I C A N V I E W 203

the real. To show how this is accomplished is the task of contemporary

comparative literary study.
As we move firmly into the second decade of the twenty-first century,
what is clear is the need for a new paradigm for broadly global as well as
for more local ways of studying culture and literature. This new poiesis of
­comparative study ought to be based on a new sense of the dynamics of
how knowledge is generated and how human resources are used and should
­recognize the rich reservoir of knowledge that exists in languages and ­cultures
that have in the past not been deemed worthy of study or comparison. The aim
of critical work undertaken by comparative studies and comparing literatures
worldwide might well be to ensure that the variety of regions that we can
for convenience’s sake call the global South receive their due on the basis of
their own rich heritage in a world of equals that are not classed in the static
categories that Casanova decries or the exclusive formulations of cultural
political practice to which Moretti’s method of “distant reading” offers such
a powerful rejoinder. We have an incalculable stake in ensuring the success
of the comparative critical projects that points us toward a new, global, sense
of world literature.

Notes
1. David Porter, “The Crisis of Comparison and the World Literature Debates,” Profession
(2011): 246.
2. Porter, “The Crisis of Comparison and the World Literature Debates,” 248. See also
David Damrosch, What is World Literature? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003).
3. Porter, “The Crisis of Comparison and the World Literature Debates,” 249. See also
Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, trans. M. B. DeBevoise (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2004).
4. Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History (London:
Verso, 2005), 2.
5. Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees, 1.
6. Porter, “The Crisis of Comparison and the World Literature Debates,” 249.
7. Porter, “The Crisis of Comparison and the World Literature Debates,” 249.
8. Porter, “The Crisis of Comparison and the World Literature Debates,” 249.
9. Porter, “The Crisis of Comparison and the World Literature Debates,” 249.
10. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquairie and Edward Robinson
(New York: Harper and Row, 1962), 92–93.
11. Gayatri C. Spivak, “Translating in a World of Languages,” Profession (2010): 35–43.
12. Spivak, “Translating in a World of Languages,” 39.
13. See Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (New York: Riverhead Books,
2007), and Salvador Plascencia, The People of Paper (San Francisco: McSweeney's Books, 2005).
14. See especially my “Transnational Migrations and Border Identities: Immigration and
Postmodern Culture,” South Atlantic Quarterly 98.1–2 (1999): 217–30, “Historical Fantasy,
Speculative Realism, and Postrace Aesthetics in Contemporary American Fiction,” American
Literary History 23.3 (2011): 574–99, and “Speculative Realism and the Postrace Aesthetic in
Contemporary Fiction,” in A Companion to American Literary Studies, ed. Caroline F. Levander
and Robert S. Levine (Oxford, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 517–31.

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