ABSTRACT
Nearly two centuries ago, Goethe, in his conversations with Eckermann, coined a term of long-lasting resonance: “Weltliteratur” or world literature as “the universal possession of mankind, revealing itself everywhere and at all times in hundreds and hundreds of men.” And he continued: “I therefore like to look about me in foreign nations, and advise everyone to do the same” (Eckermann 1930: 165). According to Goethe, the “epoch of World-literature” was a desideratum to be attained by the increasing communication among nations; for Marx and Engels it was a historically inevitable outcome: “In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal interdependence of nations. … National onesidedness and narrowmindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures there arises a world-literature” (Marx 1932: 325). But Weltliteratur, as understood traditionally, is not an innocent term, as it designates a particular set or archive of works as “classics” or “masterpieces” endowed with a particular prestige or authoritative weight grounded on normative and highly selective value criteria. In Europe, the commonly prevailing cultural politics of granting canonical status
from a Eurocentric perspective have been criticized since the early 1960s by the influential French comparatist René Étiemble, who denounced the “scandalous disproportion” (1975: 23) between (Western) Europe and other parts of the world. However, the most acerbic canon debates were held in the United States during the 1980s and early 1990s as part of the so-called “culture wars,” a controversy that not only reshaped and widened the national canon but also changed the frames of reference adopted by the academic community worldwide. While Harold Bloom, in his best-selling work The Western Canon, insisted on “defending the autonomy of the aesthetic [which] is irreducible to ideology or to metaphysics” (1994: 10) and maintained aesthetic “supremacy” for “the wealth of Western literary tradition” (1994: 8), others in the United States rejected the exclusive criteria of intrinsic qualities, focusing instead on the function literature may have in a specific historical context, thus embracing the national reality of multiculturalism and pluralism. For these critics, “the shaping of the new canon was now seen as a battle-ground for social and
political contention” (D’haen 2011: 27), privileging as criterion for inclusion the representativeness of a given work. And Paul Lauter, editor of the groundbreaking Heath Anthology of American Literature, in part “guided by how a text engages concerns central to the period in which it was written as well as to the overall development of American culture,” argued that it was now possible to value the once marginalized minority literatures and thus “study the diverse and changing cultures of America” (1990: xxxv). Meanwhile, in the United States Latino/a authors, even if only those considered particularly “marketable,” have become part of the mainstream publishing industry, and Latino studies have been institutionalized in the academy. In Europe, not surprisingly, things are quite different; nevertheless, the European strategies of Latino “transatlantic” translation are an engaging story to tell.
