WHAT GLOBAL ENGLISH MEANS for WORLD LITERATURE Chapter Author(S): HARUO SHIRANE

Chapter Title: WHAT GLOBAL ENGLISH MEANS FOR WORLD LITERATURE Chapter Author(s): HARUO SHIRANE Book Title: Think in Public Book Subtitle: A Public Books Reader Book Editor(s): SHARON MARCUS and CAITLIN ZALOOM Published by: Columbia University Press Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7312/marc19008.35 JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms Columbia University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Think in Public This content downloaded from 86.59.13.237 on Wed, 16 Jun 2021 11:55:01 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms WHAT GLOBAL ENGLISH MEANS FOR WORLD LITERATURE HARUO SHIRANE lobalization is one of the great issues facing universities today, particularly in humanities departments. It means dif- G ferent things to different people, but most agree that globalization pluralizes. In the words of Jonathan Arac, globalization “opens up every local, national or regional culture to others and thereby produces ‘many worlds.’ ”1 However, this rapid pluraliza- tion is occurring in the age of English, when a single language has achieved a dominance hitherto unknown in world history. As a result, the many worlds opened up by globalization are increas- ingly likely to be known through that single language alone. The combination of globalization and “Globlish” paradoxically tends to flatten foreign cultures even as it enhances their accessi- bility. Minae Mizumura’s recent book, The Fall of Language in the Age of English (skillfully translated from the Japanese by Mari Yoshihara and Juliet Winters Carpenter) reveals the various consequences of that flattening from the perspective of a prominent writer working in a non- European language. For those living in the Anglosphere, no barrier seems to stand between their world and the many other worlds that now appear at the push of a but- ton. But for those outside that world, particularly in non- European This content downloaded from 86.59.13.237 on Wed, 16 Jun 2021 11:55:01 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 358 Q What Global English Means for World Literature countries, the literary and linguistic consequences of globalization in the age of English can often be severe. Mizumura’s book met with fierce hostility in Japan when it first came out in 2008. The original Japanese title means literally “when the Japanese language falls: in the age of English.” Largely because of the provocative title, which suggests the imminent demise of Japanese, it caused a furor and became an internet sensation in which legions of bloggers gave their opinions, sometimes without even bothering to read the book. Mizumura was attacked from both ends of the political spectrum. On the right she was criticized as anti- Japanese and antinationalist for implying that the Japanese language had weakened in the face of English. In the book, she advocated returning to the great Japanese novels of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which she considered the peak of modern Japanese literature and a means to revitalizing literary Japanese and Japanese language education as a whole. This stance caused her to be attacked on the left as reactionary and elit- ist, as a writer who harked back to the dark pre– World War II days and the country’s imperialist past. The fierce argument across digital media helped make The Fall of Language in the Age of English a national best- seller (a rare phe- nomenon for such an academic book), with over 65,000 copies sold to date, and stirred a national debate about the weaknesses of both Japanese and English education in Japan. Despite the book’s title, Mizumura does not actually believe that the Japanese language is about to collapse; instead, she is concerned about the diminish- ing quality of literary Japanese and the fate of contemporary Jap- anese literature in an era of English. Why was Mizumura’s book translated into English? What can this book teach those who know little or nothing about Japanese literature and will probably never read Japanese? The book chal- lenges us to reconsider global literature in an age of English, and This content downloaded from 86.59.13.237 on Wed, 16 Jun 2021 11:55:01 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Haruo Shirane Q 359 it reminds us of the value of reading literature in the original, whatever that language may be. Mizumura traces the rise and decline of modern national literatures, using the example of Japa- nese literature. In the process she raises key questions about the relationship of local vernaculars to what she calls “national language” and the complex relationship of that national language to the new “universal” language (English), particularly as these con- cern a writer working in a non- Roman script or nonphonetic writing system. By “national language,” Mizumura means a local spoken language that has become a standardized, written, print language bound up with the identity of a modern nation- state; it differs from “local language” in that it takes on many of the important func- tions of “universal language,” particularly by translating into the national language the advanced knowledge carried by the universal language. In the medieval and early- modern periods, transnational languages such as Latin, Arabic, or literary Chinese served as the language of high culture and technology; in the modern period, “national languages” have taken on that role. However, unlike the premodern period, when there were multiple “universal” (transnational, cosmopolitan) languages, or the modern period (late nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century for Japan), in which national languages and national literatures flourished, the present age has seen a single tongue become the one and only universal language. English’s dominance in all spheres from science to literature is far greater than that of the earlier cosmopolitan languages such as Latin in medieval Europe, literary Chinese in East Asia, Arabic in the Middle East, or French in nineteenth- century Europe. Because there are now more literate people than at any other time in world history and because of new technologies that create global simultaneity on an unprecedented scale, English now penetrates every sphere. This content downloaded from 86.59.13.237 on Wed, 16 Jun 2021 11:55:01 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 360 Q What Global English Means for World Literature Much has been said recently about the growth of world literature in the age of globalization, but this has overwhelmingly come from those writing in English and/or dealing with literatures in the Romance languages. For example, Pascale Casanova’s The World Republic of Letters ([1999] 2004) traces the rise and dominance of French language and literature; David Damrosch’s What Is World Literature? (2003) examines the ways in which literature travels around the world, either in translation or from one language to another, often following trade routes.2 In secondary and higher education in the United States, the traditional canons of national literature have been expanded or broken up to include a larger corpus of literature from around the world. However, almost all of the literature dealt with in these studies is based on Euro- pean languages, and these representatives of “world literature” are read almost entirely in English translation. The assumptions of this Anglophone view of “world literature” are reflected in the genres and texts that have been chosen by Anglophone critics and scholars to represent “world literature.” Franco Moretti, for example, in his attempt to draw up a “world literary” map, ends up focusing on such modern European- based themes and genres as the “rise of the novel.”3 In most of Asia, the so- called novel was a minor genre, not even considered serious literature until the nineteenth century, mostly under the impact of the European novel, while poetry (particularly the lyric), historical writings (chronicles and biographies), and philo- sophical writing were central. Compared to educated Europeans, until the modern period, elite East Asians (especially Confucian literati) had a very low view of fiction, at least on the surface, and almost all canonical literary genres were thought to be direct reflections of individual or historical experience. In other words, the very notion of “world literature” that has emerged in English largely reflects the modern European notion of literature as This content downloaded from 86.59.13.237 on Wed, 16 Jun 2021 11:55:01 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Haruo Shirane Q 361 imaginative narrative, with particular emphasis on the epic, the novel, and the short story. In The Fall of Language in the Age of English, Mizumura, a lead- ing contemporary Japanese novelist who was educated (from high school through graduate school) in the United States and returned to Japan to become a writer, asks a fundamental ques- tion: What is the position of non- English- language writers (particularly non- European writers) in a global world so thoroughly dominated by English that no writer can escape its weighty impact? In the opening chapter, which describes her experience at an Inter- national Writing Program at the University of Iowa, she points to a hierarchy among literary languages, in which languages at the bottom are dying at an unprecedented rate, like animals and plants affected by severe environmental change, with English overrun- ning and homogenizing what had been a highly diversified linguistic landscape.

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