Claudio Guillén: (world) literature as system
On Friday 4 May 1827, relates Johann Peter Eckermann (1982), Goethe invited the French scholar Jean-Jacques Ampère to dine with them. Immediately afterwards, alone with his trusted compatriot, Goethe expressed his satisfaction at having been able to form a firm friendship with his French guest, a fel...
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| Summary: | On Friday 4 May 1827, relates Johann Peter Eckermann (1982), Goethe invited the
French scholar Jean-Jacques Ampère to dine with them. Immediately afterwards,
alone with his trusted compatriot, Goethe expressed his satisfaction at having been
able to form a firm friendship with his French guest, a fellowship which would
without doubt result in an increased dissemination of German literature in France,
for Ampère had seemed highly cultured, showed no nationalist prejudice, was a man
of the world rather than just Paris, and he was confident that this example would
soon spread amongst the French.
A few months earlier, the author of Faust had expressed quite clearly to
Eckermann his conviction that the concept of a national literature no longer made
sense and had been replaced by the concept of a Weltliteratur, whose advent augured
the beginning of a new era. He returned to this theme again in July 1827 when considering what the benefits of a closer literary relationship between the Germans,
French and English might mean for this cultural phenomenon, whose features, in his
view, would become more precise day by day. And indeed, twenty years later, in
1848, Marx and Engels would include the same concept of Weltliteratur in the Communist Manifesto, a defining concept of “the quintessential literature of modern times”
(Damrosch 2003: 4). Another example of the unstoppable advance of the economy
in a direction which would nowadays be identified with so-called globalisation.
Ampère, in fact, belonged to the exclusive circle of the French founders of a new
discipline, Literature Comparée, which at that time was being nurtured by Abel-François
Villemain. As well as its obvious connection to literary history, this new discipline
was also linked to criticism, and at the same time closely related to what we now call
Literary Theory. Ampère himself, in his inaugural lecture at the University of Marseille in 1830, reiterated the idea that the “philosophy of literature and the arts”
should arise from the comparative history of artistic expressions.
So, by the 1830s we have two proposals, both very similar and perhaps symbo-
lized in their proximity by the bonding which occurred at the meeting of Goethe and
Ampère. The first proposal, of Weltliteratur, responds to the prophetic vision of a
major poet, and defines a territory: literature without borders. That is precisely the
object of this undertaking, a largely utopian, new discipline based on a method,
namely comparison, which at |
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