The Worldliness of Weltliteratur: Goethe’s “Handelsverkehr” between China and Weimar

Summary

Abstract: This essay investigates the social and economic conditions that enabled Goethe's reception of Chinese literature in the 1820s, a productive engagement that led to the genesis of Weltliteratur as a critical practice. This entails a commitment to a “worlding” of world literature, that is to say, a form of analysis that pays heed to the actual conditions of translation, production, transport, and communication between China and Weimar in the period. Taking Peter Perring Thoms's translation Chinese Courtship as a case study, it is possible to show how Goethe's seemingly abstract and intellectual idea of Weltliteratur is anchored within networks of commercial and imperial mediation of literatures from around the globe. This then allows us to trace the tensions between two competing moments at the heart of Goethe's formulation of world literature, cosmopolitan Theilnahme and Eurocentric universalism, more fully. Finally, this historical account may be considered to be an intervention in contemporary debates on world literature, suggesting some of the ways in which we may critique the continuing structures and practices of inequality in world literary criticism's current modes of worldmaking.

Keywords: world literature, Chinese-German relations, Peter Perring Thoms, “worldliness” of literature, Goethe's Chinese poetry

THIS ESSAY INVESTIGATES the material conditions of Goethe's reception of Chinese literature in the 1820s in order to discuss a potential European bias within Goethe's thoughts on Weltliteratur (world literature). This question has been central to debates on world literature since its emergence as a fully fledged critical discourse in the 1940s. Erich Auerbach criticized Goethe's “altbürgerlich-ständisch” (solid bourgeois) prejudices in Mimesis as having held back a democratization of culture in the 1830s, something that he later saw as prefiguring a turn toward the type of nationalism that drove Auerbach himself into exile in Istanbul. Edward Said, on the other hand, defended Goethe on the grounds that his vision of Weltliteratur expresses a “humanistic culture of co-existence and sharing”: “far more than they fight, cultures co-exist and interact fruitfully with each other.” In Orientalism, Said goes even further, arguing that Germany's lack of colonial interventions in the period exculpated intellectuals like Goethe from accusations of being implicated in the processes of European imperialism.