Goethe’s Weltliteratur as a Trauma Narrative

Abstract

Abstract: The recent comparatist celebration of literature in the shape of “planetary system,” which is on the rise in the last two decades of the discipline’s development, promoted Goethe to the status of its chief engineer. Disregarding important differences between Goethe’s and our age, recent interpreters placed his idea of world literature at the service of their particular geopolitical projections. In order to avoid such “nationalism masquerading as globalism” (Spivak), I will focus on both personal and collective traumatic constellations, which generated Goethe’s “project” of world literature. He felt stranded in his present as both a writer and German. This is why he, in both capacities, envisioned transborder alliances as the best method of coping with these frustrations. The paper investigates this personal and national investment in his idea of world literature in more detail.

Key words: world literature, cosmopolitanism, nationalism, trauma

Vladimir Biti. Goethe’s Weltliteratur as a Trauma Narrative[J]. Foreign Literature Studies, 2018, 40(5): 13-28.

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