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Goethe Weltliteraturja és a globalizáció (részlet)

Abstract

Who Worlds Literature? Goethe’s Weltliteratur and Globalization

In this excerpt Vladimir Biti claims that Goethe came to model his concept of Weltliteratur and its dialogic principle of “unity-in-diversity” on the diffuse, decentered and frustrated German national identity, still in the process of self-discovery at the time. Confronting the perceived backwardness of German literary culture, Goethe conceived world literature as a trauma narrative, thus made it open to further exclusions inevitable in any act of trauma redemption. Biti traces how Goethe turned his understanding of world literature from a tool of self-exemption to that of self-expansion, sliding from the emancipatory discourse of his Greek elitism to a Roman cosmopolitan imperialism by reinforcing the self-assertion of “agencies” at the expense of “enablers”.