As its name suggests, world literature – a branch of comparative literature once associated primarily with an established canon of mostly Western classical masterpieces – has embraced literatures written in non-Western languages more readily than has the broader field of comparative literature.  In “What is World-Literature?” (1886), the opening section of his discussion of world literature, the early Irish comparatist Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett demonstrates real openness to a broad spectrum of the world’s literatures (50).  More than a century after Posnett, David Damrosch, in his own What is World Literature?, expresses similar flexibility:

I take world literature to encompass all literary works that circulate beyond their culture of origin either in translation or in their original language . . . a work only has an effective life as world literature whenever, and wherever, it is actively present within a literary system beyond that of its original culture (4, 281).

In theory, Posnett’s and Damrosch’s responses to the question “What is World Literature?” include not only texts that circulate among European and North American nations or between these and other cultures but also those inaccessible to readers unfamiliar with non-Western languages.   

Yet in practice, literary networks within and among non-Western regions, especially contacts of the last few centuries, receive much less notice than those where Europe and North America figure prominently, most frequently as a source (e.g., Chinese engaging with European aesthetics), but also as a destination (e.g., Europeans engaging with Chinese aesthetics).  As Kan Wang has observed, “[Because] the hierarchy privileging Western language literature has become increasingly solidified . . . [Chinese and other non-Western writers] cannot enter into the ranks of ‘universal writers’ without recognition from the West” (571).  Similarly, to quote Stephen Owen, “For a young Korean poet to be translated into Tagalog and acclaimed in Manila is, no doubt, a matter of satisfaction; but it has less cachet than to be translated into English or French and invited to New York or Paris.  It is unfair but it is a fact” (533).  Likewise, although an Asian-language text that has been translated into other Asian languages but not into any Western languages would generally not be spoken of as world literature, a European-language text that has circulated widely in Europe but not been translated into a non-European language would even today likely be regarded as world literature.[4]  As Owen asserts, these are facts.  Yet we must be careful to use them to expose rather than to perpetuate inequities.  

By working more assiduously to unearth the multiple, multi-directional, forever mutable, and frequently precarious textual pathways that have crisscrossed the globe across time, the field of comparative literature will be able not only to deconstruct cultural assumptions and hierarchies more effectively, including the absolute authority and precedence of conventional European and North American power centers, but also to create more pluralistic understandings of literatures, cultures, nations, regions, and even continents. So doing – moving more closely to region neutrality, where cultural contacts among Western spaces or between Western and non-Western sites are no longer privileged above those that involve Western power centers only secondarily if at all – provides clearer perceptions of interactions among peoples and cultures the world over, whether shunning, embracing, or far more frequently rigorously negotiating with one another in their attempt to make better sense of human experience.    

Focus on relationships among peoples and cultural spaces within the so-called Global South has uncovered many pathways of knowing and relating among Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, parts of Oceania, and much of Asia, as well as marginalized Western communities; Western power centers are not disregarded, but neither are they prioritized.[5]  Instead, this field of inquiry brings to light the complex, multitextured, and frequently nuanced and ambiguous connections among peoples and cultures globally, revealing Europe in many cases as one space among many.  Yet to date, most academic writing on literature and the Global South has highlighted relationships among Western-language creative production.[6]  Although such scholarship – which reads creative work within, across, and against formal, national, regional, and continental boundaries (Ramazani, 304) – aptly dismantles many conventional groupings, it remains relatively confined linguistically. And, by excluding interactions among close cultural neighbors (e.g., China and Japan, Singapore and Malaysia, Israel and other nations of the Levant) because of disparities in average income, life expectancy, and education of these nations (determinates of the United Nations Human Development Index on which the North-South division is largely based), academic writing on literature of the Global South paradoxically duplicates some of the same lacunae of more conventional comparative scholarship.       

Closely related to transnational studies of the Global South, yet breaking linguistic barriers more radically and illuminating a number of heretofore excluded cultural contact spaces, is scholarship on circulation of texts in local, national, and for the most part non-Western languages within and among non-Western regions, including East, Central, South, and Southeast Asia.[7] Intra-Asian comparative work dispels common and primarily Western misperceptions of the Asian continent as either a space of excess, extravagance, and near chaos, one where commonalities are so general as to be insignificant, or as a space of near unchanging uniformity, an undifferentiated, even exotic immobile other (cf. Wigen, 37).[8]  Even more important, intra-Asian comparative scholarship pushes comparative literature closer to region neutrality and provides greater impetus to radically restructure the field.  And, equally vital, it offers new understandings of the dynamics of literary networks themselves, including those that have accompanied major cultural shifts in world history (e.g., the spread of Islam to South and Southeast Asia) as well as those whose attributes create or reinforce, diverge from or even clash with official discourse and power imbalances such as significant economic, political, military, and social hierarchies (e.g., transculturation in early twentieth-century East Asia among imperial Japan, semicolonial China, and colonial Korea and Taiwan).[9]  To go one step further, focusing on the relationship between networks of Asian literatures and such regional and global challenges as atrocity, disease, environmental degradation, poverty, and war not only deepens understandings of globally renowned Asian writers, it also brings to light many texts, writers, and literary dynamics that have been relatively overlooked by Western power centers.  Additionally, it gives new perspectives on transnational issues, contributes significantly to the medical and environmental humanities, and guides the humanities writ large to engage more directly with a broader array of matters of global concern.      

Extant comparative and world literature scholarship, as well as that on national literatures, provide important foundations for these types of studies.  So too do secondary sources in a number of other fields, particularly world/global history, with its attention to empire, trade, demography, economics, religion, cultural production, disease/health, slavery, and environmental degradation among cultures and geographic regions.  But as might be expected, intra-Asian comparative scholarship – as with examinations of any number of other understudied literary networks, relies heavily on intensive scrutiny of primary sources and vernacular archives in multiple sites. Hardly neutral ground, and often replete with lacunae, archives nevertheless offer some of the field’s best hopes of unearthing the many creative trajectories that have been buried over the decades, allowing comparative literature to diverge significantly, even radically, from conventional pathways. The digital humanities are certain to help with this endeavor, including excavating some of the countless materials that have not traveled and elucidating numerous barriers to motion. Indeed, just as important to recognizing what has circulated and examining how and why particular texts crisscross nations, regions, and the globe is knowing what has not, and understanding, at least in part, why this has been the case.

An illustrative example is the Korean writer Yi Ch’ǒngjun’s novel Your Paradise (Tangsindǔl ǔi ch’ŏnguk, 당신들의 천국, 1976) on the Sorokdo (Korea) leprosarium, one of many East Asian texts that have circulated in the region and beyond; the novel has been translated into English, French, Japanese, Spanish, and Urdu. Although focusing in large part on the abuse and absolute segregation of Hansen’s disease patients, Your Paradise concludes with the marriage of an individual with Hansen’s disease to one without, an event celebrated as bringing together the island’s two communities.  As a former director of Sorokdo declares, “This longstanding embankment road [둑길] now is connected and the road [길] has opened up.  And your neighbors will unite their strength [힘을 합하다] and will protect/keep watch over [지키다] and broaden this road” (438).  The English translation additionally has the neighbors “traveling freely” across the newly opened road as well as “buttressing” it, describing more explicitly precisely how this space will be both used and safeguarded (511).[10]     The same perhaps can be said of scholarship, the concluding lines of Your Paradise helping us to reimagine the potentials of comparative literature. 

Works Cited