Abstract: Since 1827, when Goethe coined the term “world literature” on the model of Herder’s Welgeschichte, it has provoked a polemical discussion with a strong ethical emphasis. Why should Goethe, while heralding the epoch of world literature, belittle national literature as “now an unmeaning term?” The possible answers might be either he with his historical foresight was apprehensive of natioanalism in its late romantic version, or that his attitude was due to his classical taste with the ancient Greek ideal universal for culture always and everywhere. His great contemporary and countryman Wilhelm von Humboldt, in immediate response to Goethe, took issue on the side of national culture emphasizing the fact that the world, seen through the windows of different languages, could not represent a universal picture. After two centuries, the conflicting issues of world and national cultures regain critics’ attention. The concept of “world history” becomes problematic. Franco Morretti, for example, states that “World literature is not an object, it’s a problem, and a problem that asks for a new critical method; and no one has ever found a method by just reading more texts.” His view is echoed by many as a new way to approach world literature now. The “death of a discipline,” i.e. comparative study, is inevitable if we live in the global world “after nations,” but how could it be when old Babylon is still multilingual? Literature (world and national) -culture-language-territory are the key notions involved now in a dynamic relationship in the comparative study. As such, comparative literature study is not an object but a problem with a wide range of implications: political-cultural-ethical. They ask for a critical method to be transformed and updated. Could “historical poetics,” as it was laid out by Alexander Veselovsky, serve as a productive tradition in view?

Key words: world literature, ethical challenge/problem, concordia discorse, nation-culture- language-territory, poetics of world literature, boundary