Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-wq2xx Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-18T19:02:11.268Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

European Literature:1 Simply a Higher Degree of Universality?2

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 February 2009

Pascale Casanova
Pascale Casanova
Affiliation:
CRAL-EFISAL, 10, rueMonsieur le Prince, F-75006 Paris, France. E-mail: casanova.pascale@wanadoo.fr
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

One of the most difficult and uncertain areas of research offered the historian of literature today is the attempt to define ‘European literature’ as a corpus and an object of literary and/or historical analysis. The various efforts of the past few years – in the form of anthologies as well as histories of literature – usually remain torn between a unitary presupposition that seems to be the only acceptable political-historical way of justifying the body of European literature and an irreducibly composite – not to say heterogeneous – reality that is not amenable to the representations of Europe as reduced to this superficial unity. If we are to reflect on the modalities and specificities of such a historical undertaking – which has so few equivalents in the world that it is all the harder to model – and shake off political models and representations, it seems to me that we need to work from another hypothesis. One of the few trans-historical features that constitutes Europe, in effect, one of the only forms of both political and cultural unity – one that is paradoxical but genuine – that makes of Europe a coherent whole, is none other than the conflicts3 and competitions that pitted Europe’s national literary spaces against one another in relentless and ongoing rivalry. Starting from this hypothesis, we would then have to postulate that, contrary to commonly accepted political representations, the only possible literary history of Europe would be the story of the rivalries, struggles and power relations between these national literatures. As a consequence, rather than a unity that remains if not problematic at least far from being achieved, it would no doubt be better to speak of an ongoing literary unification of Europe, in other words a process that occurs, occurred and is still occurring – paradoxically – through these struggles. This upside-down history would trace the models and counter-models, the powers and dependences, the impositions and the resistances, the linguistic rivalries, the literary devices and genres regarded as weapons in these specific, perpetual and merciless struggles. It would be the history of literary antagonisms, battles and revolts.

Type
Focus: European Literature
Information
European Review , Volume 17 , Issue 1 , February 2009 , pp. 121 - 132
Copyright
Copyright © Academia Europaea 2009

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Notes and References

1. The present essay, as do the other essays making up the ‘Focus’ on ‘Literature for Europe,’ all result from a European Science Foundation-Linnköping University Conference held in Vadstena, Sweden, in May 2007, and sponsored also by the Academia Europaea.Google Scholar
2. I am merely sketching a few trails of reflection for developing a transnational literary history. ‘Life-size’ studies on these subjects would obviously require much more detailed, collective and transnational research. As I worked alone I have often taken a Franco-centric view in this article; I am fully aware of this.Google Scholar
3. See among others Tilly, C. (1995) European Revolutions, 1492–1992 (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers). E. Terray (1993) ‘Le Conflit’: L’Expérience européenne de la guerre, L’Esprit de l’Europe, vol. 2 (Paris: Flammarion), pp. 244–267.Google Scholar
4. I hope the organizers will forgive me for these few preliminary considerations, which describe a state of the discussion about European literature and by no means question the terms of the invitation to the symposium.Google Scholar
5.Debevoise, M. (trans.) (2005) The World Republic of Letters (Harvard University Press), esp. pp. 34–44 and 181–200.Google Scholar
6. See in particular O. Löfgren (1989) The nationalization of culture, National Culture as Process, Ethnologica Europea, XIX(1), pp. 5–25, quoted by A.-M. Thiesse (1999) La Création des Identités Nationales. Europe XVIIIe-XXe siècle (Paris: Seuil), p. 14.Google Scholar
7. E. Renan (1882) ‘Qu’est-ce qu’une nation’? Lecture given at the Sorbonne, 11 March, Œuvres Complètes (Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1947), t.I, section ‘Discours et Conférences’. On the same subject, see also H. Schulze (1996) Staat und Nation in der Europäischen Geschichte (München: C.H. Beck) (English translation, States, Nations and Nationalism: From the Middle Ages to the Present (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1996)), esp. chapter 4. A.-M. Thiesse (1999) La Création des Identités Nationales. Europe XVIIIe-XXe siècle (Paris: Seuil), esp. part 2, pp. 23–155.Google Scholar
8.Kafka, F. (1948) Diaries 1910–1913, edited by Max Brod, translated by Joseph Kresh (New York: Schocken), pp. 194.Google Scholar
9.Kafka, F. (1948) Diaries 1910–1913, edited by Max Brod, translated by Joseph Kresh (New York: Schocken), pp. 191, 194.Google Scholar
10. We know that, even if he did not read Yiddish, he had garnered a great deal of information about the emerging Yiddish literature, especially from his friend Itzhak Löwy. See among others E. T. Beck (1971) Kafka and the Yiddish Theater: Its Impact on His Work (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press).Google Scholar
11. F. Kafka (1948) Diaries 1910–1913, edited by Max Brod, translated by Joseph Kresh (New York: Schocken), pp. 194–195.Google Scholar
12. See A. Prassdoff (1998) ‘L’Edition européenne, solidarités et rivalités’, Précis de littérature européenne, edited by Béatrice Didier (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France), pp. 63–67.Google Scholar
13. Among the many initiatives, we note: in France, the highly official ‘Prix Littéraire Européen’, created in 1981, and awarded, with the collaboration of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, by the Association des Ecrivains de Langue Française (ADELF) – which gives some idea of its true European nature; the ‘Prix Littéraire Européen Madeleine Zepter’, created in 2004, annually rewards a novel by an author from a member country of the European Union that has been translated and published in France, or by a European Union author writing in French – which gives some idea of the French interest in European languages. It is worth noting that 2008 saw the appearance of an official ‘European Union prize for literature’, organized and funded by the European Commission. The ‘Austrian State Prize for European Literature’ [Österreichischem Staatpreis für Europäische literatur], established in Vienna in 1965, also known as the ‘European Literary Award’ [Europäischer Literaturpreis] rewards European writers and is funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Art. It could be considered to be one of the most genuinely European literary awards. But it, too, is a paradoxically national award, in other words attributed and financed by one of the states of the European Union.Google Scholar
14. See in particular J. Dugast (1998) Peut-on enseigner les littératures européennes? Précis de littérature européenne, pp. 89–93.Google Scholar
15. In his literary criticism articles, Pound suggested in 1921 that the distinction could be made in literature between ‘denationalism’ – that is, the critique of the very idea of nation – and ‘internationalism – the ties between countries. E. Pound (1921) ‘Paris Letter’, December. Dial, in Ezra Pound’s Poetry and Prose (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1991), vol. IV, pp. 210–211.Google Scholar
16.Babits, M. (1934) Az europai irodalom története (Budapest: Nyugat).Google Scholar
17.Curtius, E. R. (1948) Europäische Literatur und lateinisches Mittelalter (Berne) (English translation: European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (New York: Pantheon Books, 1953)).Google Scholar
18.Van Tieghem, P. (1969) Le Romantisme dans la littérature européenne (Paris: Albin Michel). (1935) Répertoire chronologique des Littératures modernes (Paris, Droz).Google Scholar
19.Hazard, P. (1961[1935]) La Crise de la conscience européenne (Paris: Fayard) (English translation: The European Mind, the Critical Years, 1680–1715 (London, Hollis and Carter, 1952)).Google Scholar
20. ICLA/AILC, Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages, 1973. Thirty volumes have appeared to date, the last devoted to European romantic prose: G. Gillespie, M. Engel and B. Dieterle (eds) (2008) Romantic Prose Fiction (Amsterdam: Benjamins). See also A. Marino (1998) Histoire de l’idée de ‘littérature européenne. Précis de littérature européenne, edited by Béatrice Didier (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France), pp. 13–17.Google Scholar
21.Polet, J.-C. (ed.) (2000) Patrimoine littéraire européen. Anthologie en langue française (Bruxelles: De Boeck et Larcier), 14 vols. See also B. Didier (ed.) (1998) Précis de littérature européenne (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France). A. Benoit-Dusausoy and G. Fontaine (eds) (1992) Lettres européennes: Histoire de la littérature européenne (Paris: Hachette) (reprinted by De Boeck, Bruxelles, 2007). C. Biet and J.-P. Brighelli (eds) (1993) Mémoires d’Europe. Anthologie des Littératures européennes (Paris: Gallimard), collection Folio, 3 vols. Also the series ‘Les Classiques du Monde’, Editions Zoé, Genève.Google Scholar
22. In this symbolic domain par excellence, the use of economic vocabulary – heritage, wealth or treasures – is inevitable and emphasizes the fact that we are indeed talking about the accumulation of a capital.Google Scholar
23.Hobsbawm, E. (1990) Nations and Nationalism since 1780. Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).Google Scholar
24.Anderson, B. (1983) Imagined Communities (London: Verso), esp. chapter 9.Google Scholar
25.Thiesse, A.-M. (1999) La Création des Identités Nationales. Europe XVIIIe-XXe siècle (Paris: Seuil).Google Scholar
26.Thiesse, A.-M. (1999) La Création des Identités Nationales. Europe XVIIIe-XXe siècle (Paris: Seuil), pp. 64–66.Google Scholar
27. See for instance Weisgerber, J. (1992) L’Héritage extra-européen. A. Benoit-Dusausoy and G. Fontaine (eds) (1992) Lettres européennes: Histoire de la littérature européenne (Paris: Hachette), pp. 15–19 (reprinted by De Boeck, Bruxelles, 2007).Google Scholar
28. On this subject, see in particular Y. Chevrel (1998) Peut-on écrire une histoire de la littérature européenne? Précis de littérature européenne, edited by Béatrice Didier (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France), pp. 19–36.Google Scholar