Explicitly Acknowledging All the Other Possible Routes, the Unread Books

December 19, 2022 3:23 PM

Yet even as a “mode,” literature’s circulations still move well beyond any single reader’s reach. Any individual scholar is constrained by context and limited by their languages, and so overwhelmed by world literature writ large. In an essay a decade later, [David] Damrosch revisited the issues of scale and position: “At once exhilarating and unsettling, the range and variety of literatures now in view raise serious questions about scale, of translation and comprehension, and of persisting imbalances of economic and cultural power.” from World Literature Comes Full Circle, 1522–2022 by Kevin Riordan
posted by chavenet (7 comments total)

Two weird grad school anecdotes. One definitely false, the other factual but maybe not exactly true.

First, a professor I had claimed that Voltaire was the last person to have read everything ever written (presumably not including Eastern languages). Even excluding non European languages, this is definitely not true. Fun to think about, though.

Second was that one of the reasons Moby Dick was originally unsuccessful was that the number of books being mass published in English basically increased tenfold in the few years leading up to its publication. I'm not going to Google it, but if I recall it went from like 50 books a year to 500, and that shifted the way the reading public interacted with novels. I'm pretty sure the publishing stat is correct (even if the numbers are off), but not sure that this helped sink Moby Dick, which pissed off the church, was obtuse, and had other issues at the time.
posted by Literaryhero at 10:09 PM on December 19, 2022 [1 favorite]

Damrosch’s eighty really seems a bit eurocentric. Thomas More and Voltaire speaking for Brazil/Colombia? Tolkien for New York? OK, his project isn’t a simple survey and there are some reasons, but still…
posted by Phanx at 1:33 AM on December 20, 2022 [1 favorite]

I mean, More is categorised as Brazil/Colombia because Utopia is notionally out there, though it has absolutely nothing to do with the real places. But Marco Polo is categorised as Venice/Florence though he is all about places in Asia? And how is Flights to do with Krakow and Auschwitz?
posted by Phanx at 1:47 AM on December 20, 2022 [1 favorite]

Way back when, I took a course in World Literature, which was probably the death knell of my wannabe Comparative Literature persona. One of the things the professor was trying to problematize* was the gatekeeping and categorization of what gets deemed "world literature" and what becomes "regional literature" and what becomes "ephemera." Which is actually a really good thing to get across to grad students. Especially that one super pretentious guy who always has something to say.

Anyway, a project like "Around the World in 80 Books" sounds great for covid times (vicarious travel, as noted in the review) and for those of us who kind of miss the wide-ranging reading you get assigned in college (seriously, half these books were on my Intro to CL syllabus) but it also carries a sense of ... finality? Like "check off these books and you will be a Well-Read Person." But Damrosch is smarter than that, and I love that he includes works like P.G. Wodehouse's Something Fresh (under the "London" heading, but I won't quibble -- if quibble is the word I want) and Hugh Lofting's Doctor Doolittle (though I would have suggested The Twenty-One Balloons instead).

But yeah, very Eurocentric -- gatekeeping etc etc -- The Lord of the Rings for New York is a fairly bizarre suggestion. I almost want to read this tour du monde just to see how he justifies that one. (There is a blog, but only with snippets.)

* Words like this are why I stopped doing Complit.
posted by basalganglia at 4:54 AM on December 20, 2022 [2 favorites]

Voltaire was the last person to have read everything ever written

Absolutely. He even crept into our house and broke the lock on my sister’s teenage diary. Definitely Voltaire.
posted by Phanx at 8:05 AM on December 20, 2022 [4 favorites]

Metafilter: "[T]hat one super pretentious guy who always has something to say."
posted by riverlife at 8:43 PM on December 20, 2022 [3 favorites]

Damrosch is an interesting scholar. He has a gift for identifying illuminating similarities between seemingly disparate traditions. If I’m remembering correctly, I read a piece by him years ago where he drew comparisons between the beginnings of Sumerian literature, Hebrew literature, and Icelandic literature, and went through how these very different societies figured out how to turn writing into literature. I should track that article down and read it again, because my memory is very hazy.
posted by Kattullus at 2:25 AM on December 26, 2022 [1 favorite]