‘세계문학’의 긍정성과 현재적 의미에 대한 비판적 고찰: 괴테에서 댐로쉬까지의 개념 읽기

Abstract

In the age of globalization, the category of “World Literature” is increasingly important to academic teaching and research. This paper examines such theorists' ideas of world literature as Goethe, Franco Moretti, Pascale Casanova and David Damrosch and suggests the possibility of world literature in globalization. The world literature paradigm has undergone a number of major transformations since its inception in the 1820s. Goethe had a keen sense of world literature as driven by a new world market in literature. It was this market-based approach that Marx and Engels picked up in 1848. Whereas Marx and Engels followed Goethe in seeing world literature as a modern or even future phenomenon. For Moretti world literature is ‘one, and unequal,’ structured by periphery and core. For Casanova it is governed by national accumulations of cultural capital, the most powerful cities then governing access to literary recognition on a world. Both employ market metaphors: debt, importation, direct and indirect loans, in Moretti; capital accumulation and literary value in Casanova. Damrosch harks back to Goethe's world literature as the circulation of intellectual, and more precisely literary goods among nations. I think that World literature responds to the forces of globalization by identifying with them. In this sense, the foremost aim of literary study is to describe how cultural phenomena are lost, recovered, and transformed across a planetary entanglement that has always existed but only now insistently unfurls itself for the benefit of scholars—a splendid divulgement of the world, threatening only to the faint-hearted and regretted only by curmudgeons.