The Collection, Exhibition, and Practice of Weltliteratur
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All That Is the Case: The Collection, Exhibition, and Practice of Weltliteratur A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY Andrew Nance Patten IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Professor Rembert Hueser, Advisor January 2015 Andrew Nance Patten© Acknowledgments This dissertation would not have been possible without the generous support of a number of institutions, fellowship donors, and the lasting encouragement of dedicated family, friends, colleagues, and advisors. To properly express my gratitude for the support I have received would be to exceed the space allotted for acknowledgments. I would like to convey my most sincere appreciation to the following individuals and institutions for their assistance throughout my studies: The Department of German, Scandinavian and Dutch for numerous fellowships and the continued expression of confidence in my research projects and academic development; Hella Mears for the generous Mears Fellowship and the continued commitment to German Studies at the University of Minnesota; Gerhard Weiss for the Gerhard Weiss Summer Fellowship; Die Freie Universität Berlin for the supportive exchange opportunity; and finally the University of Minnesota for the Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship and the absolutely integral progress it afforded me during this year-long award. In the course of my studies, these institutions and private contributors have been essential to my progress. I am very pleased to express my gratitude for their generosity with this dissertation. The personal contributions of my advisors and mentors have been and remain to be central to my research and development as a scholar. Thank you to Rembert Hueser for the many hours of critical input, advice, feedback, and good company throughout the years. Thank you to Leslie Morris, Shaden Tageldin, and Matthias Rothe for excellent academic advising, practical assistance, insightful comments on my work, and the continued support of my career. I would also like to express my gratitude to Ruth-Ellen Joeres for playing such an influential and supportive role in my studies. In their respective times as chair of GSD, both Charlotte Melin and Rick McCormick have provided me with departmental support for which I remain appreciative. Finally, thanks to Cathy Parlin, Melody Pauling, Amanda Haugen, and Jonathon Rusch for countless matters of assistance and for helping me out on a number of Friday afternoons just before closing time. From my days at UNR, I would like to thank John Carson Pettey, Susanne Kelley, and especially Valerie Weinstein. I would also like to express my appreciation to Ethel Matala de Mazza and Karin Krauthausen at the Humboldt Universität zu Berlin both for the feedback and for the chance to present my dissertation research to the PhD-Net colloquium. Thanks also to the Doktoranden of that group (Wintersemester 2012/2013) for their comments, specifically Yael Almog, Tanvi Solanki, and Nicholas Baer. For good conversation, proofreading, critical feedback, and discussions that turn into chapters, I am grateful for a number of friends and colleagues. Thanks to Val Pakis, to Nichole Neuman, and to Ryan O’Neill. Special thanks to Kalani Michell, who remains my best academic comrade and critical sparring partner. Finally, I am most grateful to my loving family, my parents specifically for their unending support of all kinds, and to my wife Wera, of course. i For Wera, natürlich. ii Abstract All That Is the Case: The Collection, Exhibition, and Practice of Weltliteratur From its origins in the early nineteenth century to its resurgence in the last decade (Casanova, Damrosch, Moretti, et al.), the concept of World Literature/Weltliteratur has challenged scholars to conceive of global literary space as the entirety of literature, the best of all literary works, or a world market of cultural exchange. While each new theory attempts to advance the perennial concept to fit its respective global era, it has gone overlooked that the concept itself is largely the result of a complex discursive history beginning with scholarship on Goethe and early globalization. This dissertation breaks from previous narratives of Weltliteratur as the idea of a sole visionary (Goethe) in order to ask not what Weltliteratur is in theory, but how it is realized through an array of approaches toward the organization of literature in a persistently changing discourse of globalization. In three case studies of such practices, this dissertation examine the first anthology of Weltliteratur, Johannes Scherr’s 1848 Bildersaal der Weltliteratur; the National Socialist vision of Weltliteratur in the journal Weltliteratur: Romane, Erzählungen und Gedichte aller Zeiten und Völker (1935-1939) / Die Weltliteratur: Berichte, Leseproben und Wertung (1940-1944); and finally the digital perspective of an alternative Weltliteratur archive in the algorithm-driven organization of literature in online book commerce at Amazon.com. This dissertation demonstrates how the practices of literary mediation in these collections create, rather than reflect the notion of the world literary. In doing so, it presents a new approach to Weltliteratur, not simply as another manifestation of a nineteenth-century idea, but as practices of literary mediation with real and measurable effects on the way in which texts are translated, circulated, and read. iii Table of Contents List of Figures x Introduction 1 Chapter One: Genesis 26 Conflicting Claims to the Authority of Weltliteratur 30; Fritz Strich: Secular Prophet, Critic, and Co-creator of Goethe’s Weltliteratur 39; Freier geistiger Handelsverkehr 49; Toward the Peripheries of Goethe’s Weltliteratur 64 Chapter Two: Circulation, Network, Welt – 1800 75 Circulation 84; Network 96; Infrastructure, Saint-Simonism, and association universelle 105; Weltliteratur as Network 130 Chapter Three: In the Gallery of World Literature 140 German Literary Translation and the Location of World Letters 145; The Politics of Choice in the Anthology 153; Scherr’s Gardening Shears: The Anthology and the Literary Botanical 161; Enter the Museum 183; A Portrait of the Novel as a Fragment 196 Chapter Four: Welt and Allerwelt 206 The World Fantasy and the Spatial Reality of Letters 214; Goethe und die Weltliteratur to Goethe und Die Weltliteratur 225; Text, Image, Context 245 Chapter Five: World Literature and the Digital Market 267 Literary Totality in the Age of Digital Exhibition 274; Amazon.com: Digital, Commercial, Canonical 282; Collaborative Filtering Software of Amazon’s Consumable World of Literature 302; Kleist’s Media Afterlives 315 Afterword 332 Works Cited 338 iv List of Figures Figure 1. Illustration from Ephraim Chambers’ 1728 Cyclopædia 85 Figure 2. Illustration of François Quesnay’s Tableau Économique 89 Figure 3. Illustration of Georges Buffon’s 1755 table de l’ordre des chiens 99 Figure 4. August Batsch’s 1802 Tabula affinitatum regni vegetabilis 100 Figure 5. Cover of Das Pfennigmagazin (7 March 1835) 126 Figure 6. Cover of illustration of Weltliteratur, October 1937 228 Figure 7. Cover of illustration of Weltliteratur, October 1938 237 Figure 8. Cover illustration of Die Weltliteratur, November 1941 242 Figure 9. Cover illustration of Adolf Bartel’s 1932 Goethe der Deutsche 243 Figure 10. Cover illustration of Die Weltliteratur, August 1940 248 Figure 11. Layout of text fragments in Die Weltliteratur, December 1940 258 v Introduction It is customary for studies of the concept of Weltliteratur to begin with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. The setting of this commencement is most commonly the dinner table at his Weimar home on a January evening in 1827. This is the moment of the famed conversation in which Goethe and Eckermann discussed a Chinese novel and Goethe foretold the coming epoch of world literature.1 But years of scholarship have also shown that such an origin story is questionable. To regard this moment as the starting point for something called “world literature” is to assign a performative quality to Goethe’s comments and to hold that his pronouncements turned literature into “world literature” at the table that night. To dismiss his remarks, on the other hand, is to ignore the articulation of a larger discursive shift in which he was also very much involved. Let us therefore begin with Goethe as custom dictates, but let us depart from the dinner table scene and its resulting binary of outcomes. Weltliteratur, in this case, begins not with that January evening, but with the appendix. Fritz Strich concluded his seminal study Goethe und die Weltliteratur (1946) with an appendix of the twenty passages from Goethe’s oeuvre in which the term Weltliteratur appeared.2 In its chronological span from January 15, 1827 to April 24, 1831, Strich’s collection exhibits Goethe’s idea not as a single performative utterance at the dinner 1 Goethe’s most widely known (but not first) comments on the matter were recorded by Johann Peter Eckermann on January 31, 1827: “National-Literatur will jetzt nicht viel sagen, die Epoche der Welt- Literatur ist an der Zeit und jeder muß jetzt dazu wirken, diese Epoche zu beschleunigen” (Goethe 19: 207). 2 In the English translation, Goethe and World Literature, Strich’s appendix consists of twenty one passages with the addition of the usage “Conversation with Willibald Alexis, 12th August 1829” (Strich 1949: 351). 1 table, but as a conceptual bricolage assembled over the course of four years from private correspondence, conversations, public speeches, journal entries, reviews, and other writings. Rather than refuting the popular narrative of Weltliteratur and its origins, Strich’s appendix appears as a metaphor for the function of this contested concept beyond conjecture and theory, demonstrating not what Weltliteratur is in itself, but how this vague idea is experienced in practice. As a collection of fragments and excerpts from public and private sources, the appendix suggests a single idea, a conceptual unity. Goethe’s Weltliteratur, these often contradictory remarks written, uttered, and transcribed over the course of years, appears as one, a collected display of the single parts of a whole idea.