ABSTRACTS

From Weltliteratur to Littérature-monde: Lessons from Goethe for the French Speaking World

Subha Xavier
(University of Miami)

While Michel Le Bris and the signatories of the Manifeste pour la littérature-monde insist on the need to reintegrate the world into French literature and partake in a model that is widely used in Anglophone literary and academic circles today, no mention is made of the concept's German antecedents. Indeed it was Goethe who first coined the term that spun both a philosophical and literary tradition that is still coming to grips with what it might mean to speak of a world where literature is concerned.



This paper considers Goethe's groundbreaking, though elusive, attempt to define a world, briefly tracing the concept's development through the last century as defined first by philosophers of the German and French traditions, then by scholars of World Literature and today by the writers of Pour une littérature monde. As we enter the global age, do we have a better grasp of the concept in order to ensure its workability or is the proclaimed death of Francophone literature as yet a premature one? My analysis responds to these questions by assessing the viability of the term littérature-monde, as proposed by the writers of the Manifesto and their subsequent collected volume, through their implied definitions of a world and in light of a historical debate on the very possibility of such a literature.