“Paris-Weimar and the Worlding of Chinese Novels”
9 July
Presented in the Panel “Temporalities of the Global”, moderated by Anna Degler. 14:00 – 16:30 (Berlin time).
Logistics have always been crucial to culture. A distribution network is necessary in order for a translated text to find an audience. Access to news, collecting artifacts and texts, archiving, are all forms of cultural logistics. Worlding involves the movement of a text or artifact out from its original performative arena into an international network of consumption and transfer. Goethe’s famous definition of world literature derives from his reading of Chinese novels translated into French and English, as well as his engagement with Le Globe, Journal Philosophique et Littéraire, particularly a review of Abel Rémusat’s translation of Les Deux Cousines, a late Ming-dynasty scholar-beauty romance. It is of course fitting that in formulating his paradigmatic statement about world literature, Goethe would receive his inspiration from a foreign journal sent through the mail. The fleeting, incomplete, discontinuous appearances of Goethe’s world literature statements reflect their origins in newspapers, journals, paratexts, and before dinner conversations with friends. The dispersed and irregular arrival of news that Goethe patches together into statements demonstrates that his happenstance utterances on world literature are not just a failure to deliver a systematic formulation; they are the preferred formats of the information circuits he credits with reviving international literary relations. We should not bemoan that Goethe did not get around to writing a fully composed essay on the subject, but instead appreciate that he was participating in the diffuse, new media forms he admired when he made his comments.
Introduction by Anna Degler, Postdoctoral Researcher RA 2 “Travelling Matters”
Daniel Purdy is Professor of German and Department Head at Pennsylvania State University. He was born in Berlin and raised bi-lingually in New York City. He received his B.A. from Wake Forest University in 1985 and his Ph.D. from Cornell in 1992. In 1998, he published a study on fashion and male identity, The Tyranny of Elegance: Consumer Cosmopolitanism in the Era of Goethe, with Johns Hopkins University Press. In 2005 the University of Minnesota Press published his collection of historical writings about style, The Rise of Fashion. He has also written On the Ruins of Babel: Architectural Metaphor in German Thought, (Cornell 2011) and co-edited an anthology with Bettina Brandt, China in the German Enlightenment. His newest volume Chinese Sympathies: Media, Missionaries, and World Literature from Marco Polo to Goethe is appearing this Fall with Cornell University Press.
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