Encyclopaedic Inspirations

This article is inspired by the seminar ‘Writing Transcultural Literary History in a Globalized World’, held at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Studies at Uppsala University in October 2023. The occasion was the long-awaited publication of the collective project Literature: A World History in four volumes (Damrosch and Lindberg-Wada Reference Damrosch and Lindberg-Wada2022; see Lindberg-Wada Reference Lindberg-Wada2006).Footnote ^a Including ‘a globalized world’ in the title of the seminar is an invitation to reflect on precisely such a concept; that is to say, not just to include as many literatures as possible from across the world, but to rethink the approach to literary history in this particular context, which, despite the contemporaneity it evokes, must enable us to also integrate literatures of the past. Following this invitation, I want to argue for a literary history with a world literature perspective, rather than a history about literatures around the world.

Before I indicate how I understand this perspective and its historiographic consequences in the actual production of literary histories, I find it useful to begin my argument with a reference to the approach taken by an older landmark collective project, although universalist rather than global, L’Encyclopédie (1755–1772) with Denis Diderot being the PI (principal investigator), as we would say today. The project’s tableau synoptique, which was presented in the pre-announcement of L’Encyclopédie but not included in the published version, is shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1.

Prospectus à L’Encyclopédie (1750): Tableau synoptique (Wikimedia commons, public domain)

As the ur-mother of the modern collective project, as it were, L’Encyclopédie is remarkable by being conceived from the very beginning as teamwork with a focused framework. Its aim was to provide all contributions with the same conceptual foundation, different from that of previous encyclopaedic enterprises, notably Ephraim Chambers’s single-authored English Cyclopedia from 1728 and its numerous later expanded reprints, the translation of which was first on the drawing board but was pushed aside in favour of the new project.

The French project does not have the universe, the cosmos, or the entire creation as its domain, but zooms in on those aspects that reflect the capacities of human cognition confronted with the world of human experience: entendement and connaissance humaine are the two key notions.Footnote ^b In accordance with the introduction of the modern approach to history in the Enlightenment, this project is a profoundly secular and thus a historical project leaving out any divine and transcendental assumptions (see Hartog Reference Hartog2015; Koselleck Reference Koselleck and Koselleck1979). The entire world, to the extent that it is shaping and is itself shaped through human knowledge, is then remapped according to this point of departure, which offers shared criteria for all contributors, governing their selection of topics and material to be included, the point of view of their research as well as the writing and composition of their final collective volumes.

This foundation is established with three overall aims: (1) the definition of new fields of knowledge to be included, such as technology or the social sciences, on a par with traditional areas; (2) the exclusion of obsolete fields of knowledge such as astrology or alchemy; and (3) a restructuring of known fields of knowledge and their hierarchies, for example by placing theology in the central column as a subcategory guided by reason alone, raison, not faith, and with magic and superstition now treated with a special note in the first few lines of the central column: ‘abuse’ of reason. At the same time, the study of good and evil has no longer any reference to religion but is also located in the middle column by being included entirely as part of secular ethics, morale. Furthermore, together with arts and crafts, ecclesiastic history enters the first column based on memory, mémoire; now deprived of any teleological dimensions it is no different from any of the other branches of history, all of which are regarded as transformations of theoretical and practical knowledge embedded in historical traditions.

Borders and Trajectories

As an approach to transcultural literary history in a globalized world in a historicized framework analogous with that of L’Encyclopédie – with the same three aims, although without embarking on an elaboration of a similar labyrinthine system – I would for my tableau synoptique suggest this headline: Système figuré des translocalités culturelles and, instead of entendement, the foundation of the programme to be realized would be formulated in the following way: Literatures in their local settings in view of the ways they reflect their translocal relations. Actually, this focus has been formulated in various ways since the dawn of the idea of world literature as it occurred toward the end of the eighteenth century, but the historiographical consequences are still underdeveloped (see Larsen Reference Larsen2017a). To move ahead and as a first step, I take my lead from two quotations:

Georg Brandes looks from the local context to the outside world – the effect of local literature on world literature. Édouard Glissant in his Discours Antillais (1981) arrives at a similar conclusion, yet now moving from the external reality to the local culture:

Here, the mutual alienation of domestic histories and colonial histories imbues the local histories, those of literature included, with an ambiguity.

Thus, Brandes and Glissant both pinpoint the cultural heterogeneity of a local culture in its exchange with a translocal context. In the world literature perspective I adopt, heterogeneity following from literature’s translocal relation is not a sign of crisis but a constitutive feature of any living culture and its literatures. Many countries with one official language do not enjoy absolute linguistic uniformity, such as the countries in Glissant’s Caribbean multilingual home base. Also, Brandes’s small nation state of Denmark has always been multilingual, including first of all German but also the languages of its small colonies and today the languages of immigrants. Cultural and linguistic hybridity is a basic fact, hence also a literary fact, no matter the national ideology and self-understanding of a cultural and political majority.

Only in a culture believed to be most itself when contained within stable borders with a clear ideological and linguistic centre do everyday social frictions and fractures as well as large-scale disruptions – such as war, famine, deportation, genocide, migration, natural catastrophes, the wrath of gods and ancestors or social explosions – appear as unexpected exceptions. However, throughout human history, such eruptions are rather to be seen as the bitter yet recurrent end of historically changing degrees of heterogeneity that define any culture through its relation to a translocal cultural context, yet in such extreme cases brought to a tipping point beyond control. Actually, the problems following from this wide-ranging spectrum of heterogeneity, from everyday experience of transitions, changes and tensions to large-scale disruptions, are the core of most literature I know of.

To this complex cultural reality has to be added a particular literary aspect of importance for literary historiography. In his analysis of Sadegh Hedayat’s Iranian classic The Blind Owl (1957 [1937]), Michael Beard underlines that a constitutive translocal relation also opens for a dialogical perspective beyond the heterogeneity implied by translocal cultural exchanges. Every rift, from a crevice to a crevasse, also represents a possibility for bridge building. Literature embraces this possibility. Thus, Beard insists ‘on the seriousness of Hedayat’s participation in an aesthetic system that is international, which makes The Blind Owl a commentary on our own tradition, a mirror in which Western culture sees itself transformed’ (Beard Reference Beard1990, xi, emphasis added).

Beard’s dialogical point of view of transcultural relations could be captured by Lydia H. Liu’s term ‘translingual practice’, which she suggests in order to understand Chinese literature from 1900 to 1937; such practices being ‘reducible neither to foreign impact nor to the self-explanatory logic of the indigenous tradition’ (Liu Reference Liu1995: xix; see also Jones et al. Reference Jones, Preece and Rees2019).

With the constitutive heterogeneity of any literature in mind, I will return to my analogy with L’Encyclopédie. With human understanding as its cornerstone, the Enlightenment project takes three universal building blocks as the foundation of its house of knowledge: mémoire, raison, imagination. However, for literary historiography, I refrain from using an analogous universal idea of creativity, poiesis, or, alternatively, of exclusive intrinsic features of essential literariness. Having our particular task in mind, I need only two building blocks to shape a transcultural literary history, both of these blocks form the dynamic core of the heterogeneity involved in transcultural historical processes which they shape and are themselves shaped by: movements of borders and along translocal trajectories.

First, on the dynamics of borders (see Crawford Reference Crawford2023). Interpreted primarily as cultural borders, their material manifestation may range from geographical and political to religious, ethnic, linguistic and ideological borders, often entangled with one another and directly and indirectly influenced by colonial borders and national diasporas. Let’s take a look at a few regional cases: China, Europe and Africa. Despite China’s deepfelt anxiety of lack of stability, moving borders have always been and still are decisive for its cultural values, ideological orientation and political actions. During the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644) China comprised about 50% of its present territory, surrounded by a larger Tibet and Mongolia and continuing the construction of its big wall to fence itself in as the middle kingdom, zhongguo. During the Qing Dynasty (1644–1911), governed by intruding Manchurians, it expanded to about its present size, and Communist China still questions its borders with Taiwan and engages in repeated skirmishes with India (see Elleman et al. Reference Elleman, Kotkin and Scofield2013).

Similarly, Europe’s moving borders have defined and continue to define the cultures of the continent more than stable mutually recognized national borders, as they first emerged after the Westphalian peace treaty in 1648 that marked the beginning of the gradual fading away of the medieval dynastic feudal order. Yet, from time to time, often with short intervals, borders have been agreed upon among the European powers only to be disrupted later with bloody intra-continental and global consequences (see Rady Reference Rady2022). Beyond Europe, Africa’s present borders have been created by the European ‘scramble for Africa’, epitomized by the Berlin Conference of 1884–1885, which dictated continental borders in sharp contrast to the borders indicated by the major indigenous African languages and cultures, trade routes, kingdoms, tribes and communities they supported (see Dowden Reference Dowden2009). This rift underpins the topics of most African literatures over at least the last century. To understand the ‘world’ of world literature without placing moving borders at centre stage will not get a grip of a transcultural literary history in a globalized world.

Now, let me then turn to my second foundational component: translocal trajectories (see Curtin Reference Curtin2008; Christensen Reference Christensen2012 on cultural interactions of early modernism, the peak of the Ottoman empire, early Qing, the Persian Safavids and other global power hubs). They may comprise terrestrial trade routes, known within and between all continents, migration routes, maritime routes along rivers and on oceans and later airborne trajectories; not to forget communication lines from Roman roads keeping the empire together, over the Thurn-und-Taxis postal service from around 1500, to modern mail systems and further on to electronic and digital media. Even as far back as early indigenous Australia, such trajectories have existed for the trade of ochre – probably as relay trade – and they carried the songs, rituals and narratives that generated the dynamics of the so-called dreaming across the sites of the many indigenous languages and cultures. Later, the East-African Swahili coastal trade route dominated by the expanding califates branched out across the Pacific, together with the Silk Road – or rather roads – now revived by China’s Belt-and-Road Initiative (see Frankopan Reference Frankopan2015). Along with the triangular transatlantic slave routes, this set of networks still forms complex transcultural trajectories integrated into today’s global supply chains. Following Arjun Appadurai, places may best be regarded as temporary nodes in shifting hierarchical positions for multiple flows of people, information, objects, media and technologies (Appadurai Reference Appadurai1996; see also Curtin Reference Curtin2008: 5–1).

An important aspect of those trajectories and the flows they carry with them is the dissemination of languages and communication technologies such as scripts, writing materials (paper in particular), book printing, printed mass media, etc., as well as the circulation of other arts and media than those defined by language. Translations travel along such trajectories (see Apter Reference Apter2006; Bassnett Reference Bassnett2018; Reynolds Reference Reynolds2016; Walkowitz Reference Walkowitz2015). Equally essential for a globally oriented literary history is the recognition that the translocal relations of literature also always situate local literatures in a larger linguistic context and a broad media landscape in which it has to position and re-position itself depending on the development of media technologies beyond the basic relation between oratures and literatures (see He and Bruhn Reference He and Bruhn2023; Larsen Reference Larsen2019, Reference Larsen2023). Together with translation, interactions with other media and art forms must occupy a prominent place in a transcultural literary history as they spread, connect and transform themselves along the transcultural trajectories, often in multicultural environments (and, let’s not forget, so do pandemics, fake news, drugs and trafficked people despite borders – there are always loopholes, VPNs and efficient smugglers despite lockdowns, blocked internet platforms and guarded frontiers, pace Brexit).

Literary Historiography: Two Examples

That they refer to historical realities that have been perpetuated since the earliest stages of human history is not the sole reason why my two basic building blocks – borders and trajectories – are important. They are essential because together they are drivers of literary creativity, its themes and forms and, in that capacity, determine its cultural contextualization (Adler Reference Adler and Tihanov2022). First, they challenge identity formation, collectively and individually, second, they prompt the life of languages by placing them in a context of translocal dialogue within a broader landscape of languages and media. Together, the dynamics of identity formation and language development reflect the relation between the local and the translocal and shape the constitutive heterogeneity of living cultures as it is articulated in and by literature. For literature – but not necessarily for all dimensions of culture – moving borders are more decisive than its life within fixed borders, which are always confronted with their possible movements. At the same time, trajectories carrying humans and their culture beyond borders are more important in literary history than an immanently defined local specificity with the adulation of national literatures as its most prominent manifestation.

Like the French tableau synoptique, my programmatic approach has some consequences by offering criteria for what to include, what to exclude and what to prioritize and reprioritize compared with other literary histories, as well as by suggesting guidelines for the composition of concrete literary histories. To illustrate the thorny road of implementation from principles to output I will briefly describe two projects with which I have been closely engaged in the capacity of co-author and co-editor. One is a national literary history for Danish high schools from 2009, litteraturDK, co-written with two high school teachers and a colleague from the Scandinavian Department (Andreasen et al. Reference Andreasen, Jørgensen, Larsen and Ringgaard2009). The other project is a continental literary history which appeared as volumes 32 and 33 in the International Comparative Literature Association’s series of A Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages, Landscapes of Realism 1-2 (2021–2022) (Göttsche et al. Reference Göttsche, Mucignat and Weninger2021; Larsen et al. Reference Larsen, Bille and Higonnet2022b). This international project included 52 contributors and was directed by Dirk Göttsche, Nottingham University. I worked as one of six co-editors and as a member of the core group that formulated and directed the project. I will, in just a few points, list the main priorities and constraints for both projects to show how they both are examples of transcultural literary histories in a globalized world beyond the mapping strategy.

(1) National Literature in a Transcultural Perspective

The simple question with which two high school teachers of Danish and two university academics, myself being one of them, wanted to challenge the high school curriculum of the national literature was this: How can we write a transcultural literary history for the teaching of Danish in a globalized world (Larsen Reference Larsen, Dixon and Rooney2013)? First of all, the high school text should not be a Danish literary history, but a history of literature in Denmark, thus including translations from non-Danish and non-European literatures, the changing multilingualism in Denmark used by Danes and immigrants, and inter-art and intermedia perspectives, while also opening up colonial and post-colonial perspectives. From this perspective, Shakespeare, to take one important case, is probably the most important playwright in Denmark, yet without being a Danish playwright. The globalized world being their world, it was not the students who represented a major obstacle for reaching a readership, but the many teachers who needed to change their approach to texts and teaching. However, we were helped by the fact that media, linguistics and translations are already part of the curriculum in Danish. To be brief I will just list the basic principles and practical solutions.

1. (1) To define historical periods we did not primarily use genres, trends, schools or other aesthetic or intra-literary criteria, but important historical events that identify changes in Denmark’s translocal relations with an impact on literature and cultural life in Denmark as it is influenced by changing borders and trajectories and their capacity to reshape identity formation and language. Hence, not the renaissance ca. 1500, but the reformation 1536 marks one limit; not romanticism, but the battle of Copenhagen 1801 indicates another.

2. (2) The book comprises six chapters, which correspond to the six semesters of compulsory Danish. As headlines we picked themes which are appealing to the age group of high school students and, not least, themes that are both historical in themselves as well as significant for the process of cultural history – but not only in Denmark, for example Home and Away, Imagination and Reality, Body and Society. Each of the six themes allowed us to trace one historical pathway from about the year 1000 to 2009, each chapter being subdivided into the same six periods. In this way, the book offers six parallel pathways through literature and culture in Denmark, showing that a local literary history consists of several histories, depending on the translocal cultural context (others could be made), and is not made up of one single main road through history. As the chapters are interrelated horizontally by being structured within the same periods, and vertically by covering the same overall timespan, teachers can choose to focus on, for example, the same period across several thematic headlines, on the chapters one by one or, alternatively, other pedagogically relevant selections and crossovers between chapters. The structure is a map for several possible trajectories through the history of literature in Denmark.

3. (3) The book is richly illustrated with a variety of visual materials in colour print, and with at least three thematically relevant translations for each period in each chapter proposed for closer scrutiny in the class, a total of 18.

4. (4) We had to make pragmatic choices as well, depending on curriculum requirements (e.g., obligatory authors, genres), exam system, number of semesters with teaching of literature and the number of weekly hours spent on literature etc. However, the selection of texts was not just pragmatic (i.e., as exhaustive as possible), but we picked works by obligatory authors, also unorthodox texts, which allowed us to show how they reflect translocal relations, and we added lesser-known works and writers to the same effect. The book does not set out to be as exhaustive as possible but to enable students to think about the role of literature in cultural history. Thus, a primary goal for both texts and pedagogy was the representativity of our selection with regard to translocal relations in a globalized world (see also Ringgaard and Thomsen Reference Ringgaard and Thomsen2017; Larsen Reference Larsen, Ringgaard and Thomsen2017b).

5. (5) The book is published in different formats: e-book, separate booklets of each of the six chapters and a cheaper version without the (expensive) visual material.

(2) Continental Literary History in Transcultural Perspective

The second project, Landscapes of Realism, sets out to re-read European realism from its emergence before the nineteenth century via its unfolding during the nineteenth century and further on into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries by following its global dissemination across cultures. This global outreach mainly but not only in European languages is not regarded as a one-way influence, but as a two-way traffic of mutual inspiration across cultures (see Beard Reference Beard1990; Liu Reference Liu1995). The entire project is underpinned by our approach to realism. We do not regard it primarily as a complex mirror of reality but as an ongoing experiment in grasping a fluid reality in ever new forms, which opened for a more historically sensitive approach to genres inside and outside Europe and thus implies a different take on comparative literature. Landscapes of Realism is a comparative project but also a rethinking of comparative literature (see Denecke Reference Denecke2014; Kadir Reference Kadir2004; Larsen Reference Larsen2015). Rather than focus on classical genres within the different cultures, the European in particular, we placed an equal emphasis on proto-genres, discursive modes or flexible types such as literatures of migration, travel literature, digital literature and non-European forms, each with their own aesthetic strategies. Again, I reduce the presentation of principles and methods to the main points:

1. (1) The first volume is mainly organized as historical pathways in five chapters while the second is written in four chapters under thematic headings. In order not to leave contributors alone in their expertise, each chapter contains a longer core essay (by two of the editors) that frames a number of shorter case studies (mainly by other contributors). In this way we could in each chapter cover a significant number of languages and regions as well as inter-art and intermedia perspectives and problems of translation. All contributors of case studies – and, of course, of the core essays – were obliged to have a comparative perspective beyond the local particularity and media specificity of the chosen texts and other materials. This requirement – carefully scrutinized by the editors – allowed us to cross-reference shared texts and material and comparable arguments within and across the two volumes. With thematic and not regional or national chapter headings, all chapters include texts and material from across Europe and other continents. This allowed us, where relevant, to integrate the same major works in several core essays and case studies, studied from different angles and interconnected by cross-referencing.

2. (2) With different emphases, all chapters – both in the core essays and in the attached string of case studies – discuss literature in connection with its translocal relations within and beyond Europe and its interaction with a broader media landscape as it develops through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in particular (news media, film, photo, video, visual art, opera, graphic novels, satire, digital media, e-games). Again, representativity based on shared criteria is more important than being as exhaustive as possible. The core essay, ‘Dialogic encounters’ (Larsen and Higonnet Reference Larsen, Higonnet, Larsen, Bille Jørgensen and Higonnet2022) of the last chapter in volume 2, ‘Worlding realism’ (for the term ‘worlding’, see Kadir Reference Kadir2004), and the ‘Introduction’ to this volume (Larsen et al. Reference Larsen, Bille Jørgensen, Higonnet, Larsen, Bille Jørgensen and Higonnet2022a) may be the most relevant in the discussion of transcultural perspectives on literary historiography.

3. (3) The historical chapters of volume 1 in particular focus on the heterogeneity and asynchronicity in the continental European contexts of realism, more than one-way influences from an elite group of dominant literatures to the so-called minor literatures. In both volumes, the interaction between realism and contemporary trends, such as sentimentalism, romanticism, naturalism and modernism, is taken into account together with its overlap with emerging non-fictional forms, such as journalism and scientific writing, and its later manifestations in various forms of neo-realism.

4. (4) Again, a set of pragmatic problems occurred during the project period from 2016 to 2021: contributors had to be replaced for various reasons, the pandemic changed people’s working conditions, etc. Here, it was crucial for the cohesiveness of the project that the shared conceptual framework, the perspective and the requirements to contributors remained unchanged from the beginning to the end of the writing process. With this working principle in mind, our first seminars, rotating between most of the participating seven universities, were brainstorming seminars with local colleagues and a few special invitees, not all of whom necessarily became contributors. This procedure enabled us to clarify our tableau figuré before the first drafts of core essays and case studies were composed and corrected (or rejected) in a series of working seminars during the final writing process. This two-phase structure gave the project an internal group dynamic that was experienced as a strong motivation for all participants with constantly evolving step-by-step progress, despite the pandemic, colleagues who passed away, local institutional problems and financial hurdles. All literary histories today require teamwork, but not all of them organize their work as teamwork, only as the sum of individually conceived contributions. Our project did – to the benefit of the working process, its final result and the wider perspectives.Footnote ^c

Moving Forward

The two projects are the two most inspiring collective projects I have ever been involved with; mainly, I think, because the focus was on rethinking, reconceptualizing and rewriting literary history as a transcultural project in a globalized world. They showed me that Brandes was right: the most important transcultural literary histories in a globalized world have a local – national, regional, continental – foundation with a comprehensive translocal perspective. Hence, mapping the world according to fixed spatial subdivisions, as is the habit of most world literary histories, is a strategy which, by being primarily oriented toward localities, will miss the dynamic of literary creativity that is precisely an ongoing transcultural exchange across borders.