In the first volume of Literature: A World History, the authors introduce and discuss the early literatures of the world, setting the end of that initial period to about 200 CE. With the spread of writing, oral texts of particular importance to their culture eventually began to be written down, and new written texts in prose and verse began to be produced. Well before 200 CE, major literary traditions in writing had evolved in many parts of Asia, in northern Africa, and in southern Europe. Humankind and its immediate ancestors stem from Africa, and hominins of different species successively spread from there. The volume concludes with a brief consideration of important similarities and differences between some of the literatures introduced.
The paper focuses on Kafka's short narrative The Judgement (Das Urteil, 1912). However, although the contribution may be of some interest for the understanding of this Kafka story and of Kafka's achievement in general, The Judgement is being discussed primarily as an illustrative example. The main point of the paper is to sketch an overall perspective on the ordinary reading of literature. it is commonly believed that interpreting critics and ordinary readers basically have to perform the same task: that of understanding the meaning of the text in question. The author argues that this view seriously misconstrues the activities of both critic and reader. He also discusses, in a more tentative fashion, what one is rationally justified to demand from ordinary readings of literature performed for the sake of understanding and experiencing a literary text.
In my paper, I will revisit the problem of paraphrase described by Cleanth Brooks in “The Heresy of Paraphrase” (1947). A poem by the Swedish author Tomas Tranströmer (b. 1931), “Fire-Jottings” (“Eldklotter”, 1983) will be used for exemplification. I intend to stress that literary texts are meant to be read and experienced. Properties of a kind usually called formal affect the reader’s experience significantly. In the course of my argument, I will give a concise analysis of the form of the Tranströmer poem and make some observations about possible effects of the formal qualities. A literary text can be conceived of as a potential source of literary experiences. Every change in the text, for instance its replacement with a paraphrase, will inevitably alter some of its properties and hence, potentially, its effects on a reader. Although paraphrases of literary texts can have legitimate uses there is, consequently, an important sense in which literary texts cannot be paraphrased. For obvious reasons, it is also impossible to equate a literary experience with a paraphrase of it. One may question whether it is justified to push literary experience into the foreground as resolutely as I do. Does not the impossibility of literary paraphrase have to do, rather, with the inexhaustibility of the literary text itself? I will meet objections in this vein by relativizing the very idea of a text, such as it is ordinarily conceived, as resting on a metaphoric basis, and by explaining why the question of paraphrase is best addressed without the help of that metaphor.
Literary History: Towards a Global Perspective is a research project funded by the Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsrådet). Initiated in 1996 and launched in 1999, it aims at finding suitable methods and approaches for studying and analysing literature globally, emphasizing the comparative and intercultural aspect.
Even though we nowadays have fast and easy access to any kind of information on literature and literary history, we encounter, more than ever, the difficulty of finding a credible overall perspective on world literary history. Until today, literary cultures and traditions have usually been studied separately, each field using its own principles and methods. Even the conceptual basis itself varies from section to section and the genre concepts employed are not mutually compatible. As a consequence, it is very difficult, if not impossible, for the interested layperson as well as for the professional student, to gain a clear and fair perspective both on the literary traditions of other peoples and on one's own traditions.
The project can be considered as a contribution to gradually removing this problem and helping to gain a better understanding of literature and literary history by means of a concerted empirical research and deeper conceptual reflection. The contributions to the four volumes are written in English by specialists from a large number of disciplines, primarily from the fields of comparative literature, Oriental studies and African studies in Sweden. All of the literary texts discussed in the articles are in the original language.
Each one of the four volumes is devoted to a special research topic.
In several cases, the literary cultures described in the first volume of Literature: A World History influenced each other more or less deeply. In particular, cultural and literary impulses going between western Asia, Egypt, and southern Europe have surfaced again and again in our history. Societies before 200 CE were of many different kinds, and literatures varied greatly in character and social function over that large time span. Purely oral literary cultures represent, themselves, a heterogeneous category. Oral literature no doubt also flourished in literary societies before 200 CE. The earliest fully developed systems of writing were difficult to use, and in societies like ancient Egypt and ancient Mesopotamia writing and reading were typically performed by specially trained scribes. The Sanskrit literary tradition had a decidedly more religious character than its Chinese and Greco-Roman counterparts. The literary cultures themselves have comparatively little to offer of general reflection on the theory of literature.
The concept of meaning is often treated as if it were a unitary concept, also when it is used about literature. Yet literary meaning is not all of a kind, and hence one cannot generalize about its overall characteristics. What is commonly called meaning in literature comprises a number of separate phenomena. A simple distinction between linguistic meaning, applicatory meaning, and critical meaning is introduced with the help of a literary example, Edith Södergran’s poem “My Childhood Trees” (“Min barndoms träd”, 1922). The dangers of treating literary meaning as a homogeneous phenomenon are then illustrated by considering the standpoints of two theorists: Jonathan Culler, who describes literary meaning as indeterminate, and Robert Stecker, who portrays it as determinate. In reality, linguistic meaning will have to be understood as being determinate, applicatory meaning as indeterminate, and critical meaning, existing in many varieties, as sometimes the one, sometimes the other. Problems analogous to those besetting the concept of meaning also arise in connection with the critical use of several other key literary-theoretical notions, such as “literature”, “text”, “form”, and “genre”.
The expression “world literature” is currently being used in several ways: about various cul-turally and temporally inclusive bodies of literature and about various ways of studying such literature. In the article, special attention is devoted to the editorial concept of world literature in The Cambridge History of World Literature (2021), edited by Debjani Ganguly. Formula-tions about world literature sometimes cast it as a mind-independent entity, sometimes as a scholarly construction. It is argued that the choice between these alternatives is important, since it has significant consequences for the logic of thinking and reasoning about world literature.
The expression “world literature” is currently being used in several ways: about various culturally and temporally inclusive bodies of literature and about various ways of studying such literature. In the article, special attention is devoted to the editorial concept of world literature in The Cambridge History of World Literature (2021), edited by Debjani Ganguly. Formulations about world literature sometimes cast it as a mind-independent entity, sometimes as a scholarly construction. It is argued that the choice between these alternatives is important, since it has significant consequences for the logic of thinking and reasoning about world literature.
Readers often relate literature to life, and this may give literature the capacity to influence individuals and communities. The connection between literature and life is usually supposed to come about because literary texts convey explicit or implicit statements, or because readers involve themselves in the events described in the text through identification, empathy, or simulation. A third mechanism is the centre of attention in this paper: readers draw analogies from the literary text to reality. Elaborating on my earlier analyses of analogical thinking and similar processes, I suggest that actual reactions to literature must sometimes be understood as resulting from mental operations, in which the reader sets up an analogy between a textual element and something in the world outside. Such reader-made analogies between literary texts and the world are crucial in understanding how literature can influence people. However, analogical thinking provides merely a general model for understanding how readers of literature form ideas about the real world. One often has to analyze the processes in finer detail, and thus develop more specialized descriptions and concepts.