Goethe’s concept of world literature, which from the very beginning had been polemically opposed to national literature (which was advancing at the time), became, for understandable reasons, the central guideline of comparative literature, which was, as it were, located ‘above’ national literatures. However, Goethe’s essentially emancipatory concept was by no means designed by him as a transhistorical concept. His much-discussed statement of 31 January 1827 underlines from the outset a temporality conceived as epochal, in which the creator of Faust sets himself at a beginning, as expressed in the phrases handed down by Eckermann (Reference Eckermann and Bergemann1981: 211): ‘National literature does not want to say much now, the epoch of world literature is at hand, and everyone must now work to accelerate this epoch.’

The long-lasting productivity of the concept of world literature coined by Goethe is beyond question, especially for comparative literature. But this fertility should not tempt us to see world literature on this planet as a phenomenon and way of being of literature that transcends the most diverse periods. For, as an epoch, world literature not only has a beginning, but also an end. As a concept, it is historically determined: the place of reading this world literature is in Europe, in Weimar.

From today’s perspective, the epoch of world literature apostrophized by Goethe is to be understood as an unmistakably completed phase of literary history that has reached its historical end (see the chapters ‘The world of world history’, ‘The world of world literature’ and ‘The world of the literatures of the world’ in Ette Reference Ette2021, pp. 30–45). If world literature, even in Goethe’s terms, cannot be conceptualized without the process of globalization at that time (D’haen Reference D’haen2021), then this concept has also become historical in the sense that it must be opened up in its historical development to the problems of current globalization phenomena and the transcultural processes associated with them. Consequently, the concept of world literature does not have much to say today beyond the epochal.

Before we ask which term should take the place of world literature in future comparative literature studies, we need to clarify another question: Which epoch preceded the emergence of the term ‘world literature’? The answer is simple. The Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh, the Chinese Shijing and the tales of the Thousand and One Nights, which draw on ancient Indian and Arabic sources, among others, obey different literary systems and logics, which – to put it simply – were not intertextually connected (Zhang Reference Zhang2023). We can generally refer to this millennia-long phase as the unconnected literatures of the world. They obeyed largely isolated logics.

But things were different in Goethe’s time. The tremendous surge of expansion that catapulted Western Europe and, from the end of the fifteenth century, the Iberian powers into the first phase of accelerated globalization (Ette Reference Ette and Person2016), as well as the worldwide expansion of France and England from the middle of the eighteenth century, had created new economic and socio-political foundations, without which the emergence of Goethe’s world literature in the first third of the nineteenth century would not have been possible.

However, the historical becoming of a world literature, as it could be conceived from Weimar, from Germany, from Europe, does not protect it from the developments of a long observable historical becoming, which, after the epoch of world literature and especially in the awareness of the continued effect of this so influential constellation (Lamping Reference Lamping2010; Lamping and Zipfel Reference Lamping and Zipfel2005), has to strive for new, multi-logical models of understanding, which no longer follow the idea of a dominantly spatial history but a history of vectoricity. In this epistemic context, the concept of ‘world literature’ needs to be translated and restructured for the present and future of philological activity – also and especially for the field of critical philology, which is aware of its own European genesis and the existence of other philologies (Messling and Ette Reference Messling and Ette2013). This self-criticism is not easy for Western comparative literature.

The legacy of Goethe’s concept can be seen in the unmistakable centring of a system of world literature which, in terms of production and reception aesthetics, is no longer oriented towards Weimar, but quite naturally towards Paris (Casanova Reference Casanova1999) or New York (Damrosch Reference Damrosch2003) as centres of world literature, even in more recent drafts. It is therefore urgently time, today, to no longer speak of world literature in a sense that is entirely oriented towards the forms and norms of Europe, but rather in an open, multi-logical understanding of the literatures of the world, which are intensively intertextually networked with one another after the epoch of world literature. This includes the sometimes surprising incorporation of Western world literature, for example by Chinese literature (Zhang Reference Zhang2024), as well as the recourse not only to Kafka, but above all to Latin American literatures by authors such as Mo Yan or Can Xue.

The difference between the still intertextually unconnected and the closely networked literatures of the world is made abundantly clear by the example of China (Ette forthcoming). This intertextuality forms the beating heart of those literatures of the world which, since the end of the twentieth century – but this development was already apparent around the middle of this century, for example in Jorge Luis Borges or Octavio Paz – quite obviously obey different logics. It could very well be said that the development towards a multipolar system was anticipated in the multi-logical planetary system of literatures. The highly conflictual emergence of an unmistakably multipolar system is now also clearly evident on a global political level.

In Erich Auerbach’s 1952 essay on the ‘Philology of World Literature’, published at the same time as Borges and Paz, this pluralization flashes up in the face of the Shoah and the horror of National Socialist barbarism, in which the Romance philologist professed a philology in the spirit of Vico and Herder and thus the ‘acquisition of a unified idea of man in its diversity’ and drew on Goethe’s knowledge ‘of the literatures of the world’ (Reference AuerbachAuerbach 1967 [1952]: 302, emphasis added). In Auerbach’s work, this concept appears only briefly, without being elaborated epistemologically.

Such an elaboration, however, is without a doubt the programmatic future task of a comparative literature that understands itself globally. It must bid farewell to the epoch of world literature that has long since become historical, and open itself up to a multi-polar and multi-logical system. Let’s be clear: there are no meridians that have their zero point in Paris or New York, no greater or lesser distances to Western centres against which the literatures of the world must measure themselves. There is no first, second, third or fourth world of literature. It is time for comparative literature to say goodbye to the concept of world literature, at the latest with a view to the twenty-first century.

The intertextual and transcultural networking (Bachman-Medick Reference Bachmann-Medick2001) of the world’s literatures is inconceivable without the process of Europe’s massive worldwide expansion and the associated spurts of globalization. The various phases of this long-lasting history of globalization, which included not only economic and social, biopolitical and military aspects, but also cultural, literary and, in the broadest sense, imaginary aspects (García Canclini Reference García Canclini1999), can probably best be told in a multi-perspective way by drawing on the most diverse literatures of the world. For these are not only representations of reality, but also representations of lived realities from the most diverse points of view and cultural logics.

The literatures of the world traverse the millennia and the languages, traverse the cultures and the systems of writing and signs used by them, present us with the forms of life and norms of life of the most diverse political power relations and economic orders, of the most diverse biopolitical and social configurations, whereby their respective universes of discourse do not represent scientifically disciplined and thus culturally fixed forms of symbolic expression, but rather forms that defy any form of discipline. Comparative studies dealing with these texts do not only draw on the specialized knowledge within a particular (e.g., Western or Chinese) philology, but also on the knowledge that can be found in the most diverse expressions of life knowledge since the beginnings of the world’s literatures.

The extent to which cultural logics differed between Europe and the Chinese world in the fifteenth century can be beautifully illustrated by the story of the ‘discovery’ of Latin America. While the Chinese Zheng He, who came from an Islamic family, sailed along what is now the Latin American coast on his sixth voyage, with a huge fleet and a large force on ships that could fall back on highly advanced navigation, but was punished on his return to China and his fleet scrapped, the arrival of the European Christopher Columbus with three ridiculously small ships with far inferior technology and poorly equipped crews became the beacon of an expansion that was geared towards conquest and colonization from the very first moment. While China’s history was not geared towards colonial expansion in a territorial understanding of Tian xia (Zhao Reference Zhao2020), the Iberian powers and, after them, other European states followed their traditional logic of expansion and colonization. In the same century, both the Europeans and the Chinese obeyed very different cultural logics, which also characterized their literatures.

Today, after the end of the fourth phase of globalization, which began in the 1980s and ended more than three decades later, we are dealing with the co-presence, combinatorics and conviviality of different logics within what we should call the term and concept of the world’s literatures. The globalization of Portuguese and Spanish, French and English that accompanied the first two phases has given rise to lusophone, hispanophone, francophone and anglophone cultural spaces and literary systems, which – if we look at the historical and contemporary centres of the respective literary languages – have very different logics. Just how complex, ambiguous and sometimes contradictory the ‘intertwining’ and transcultural interpenetrations between individual cultural areas are can be illustrated very clearly using the example of the literatures of the Caribbean, one of the great concentration areas of globalization and one of the most active and successful literary trans-areas on our planet (D’hulst et al. Reference D’hulst, Moura, De Bleeker and Lie2007).

If we include the Arabic, Indian or Chinese literary spaces, we quickly realize that no centralizing and universalistic concept, such as that of world literature, can do justice to this diversity of logics. World literature is therefore, in Goethe’s sense, a precisely defined epoch that began at a certain point in time – towards the end of the second phase of accelerated globalization – has been increasingly fragile since the middle of the twentieth century and has become obsolete since the end of the twentieth century.

In a world in which irrationality is increasingly gaining ground in international relations and within a large number of societies, in a world in which military conflicts and armed conflicts are increasingly brazenly presented as ‘solutions’ to political or social disputes, comparative literature must fully rely on the comprehensive knowledge of the world’s literatures and its communication. Just as the First World War ended the third phase of accelerated globalization, so today the danger of an even more devastating global conflict increasingly threatens the continued existence of a humanity on the run.

After all, migration and transmigration are a disturbing fact worldwide, especially after the end of the fourth phase of accelerated globalization. While the Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees in Geneva, the UNHCR, registered 2.4 million refugees worldwide in 1970 – only as a result of wars, civil wars or persecution – by 1980 the figure had risen to 7.4 million and by 1990 it had already increased to more than 17 million. Credible studies assume that these figures would rise to more than 20 million if the internally displaced persons and the total of more than 2 million Palestinian refugees were added. The war in the Gaza Strip is dramatically exacerbating this situation. In 2021, the number of refugees exceeded one hundred million.

Already at the beginning of this rise, the Spanish writer Juan Goytisolo (Reference Goytisolo1994: 12) predicted in a review of Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s debut novel that the future of French literature would be written by writers from the Maghreb or the Caribbean, that of German literature by Turks – we could add an open list of Spaniards, Syrians or Afghans – and that of English literature by Indians and Pakistanis. The development of translingual literatures without a fixed abode is progressing worldwide under the impression of ever-increasing flows of refugees (Ette Reference Ette2005). Nobel Prize winners in literature such as V.S. Naipaul, Herta Müller, Gao Xingjian and Mario Vargas Llosa stand for this, as do the names of Salman Rushdie, Jorge Semprún, Norman Manea, Elias Khoury and Amin Maalouf, who cross and connect the most diverse literatures of the world. Literatures without a fixed place of residence also form an increasingly important part of the world’s literatures and require the analyses of globally oriented comparative literature. This is because philologies with a national literary focus fail at this point.

Of course, inhuman dictatorships and the refugee movements they trigger are not just a problem of our time. Warlike conflicts and the limits of human desire have characterized writing in the most diverse cultures since the beginnings of the world’s literatures. The world’s literatures have always depicted these conflicts, but also effective conflict resolution strategies. French literature began with the Serments de Strasbourg, which focused on the containment of a war that threatened all sides and in which the oath of mutual support was sworn in the language of the other. Questions about conviviality, about the possibilities and limits of human coexistence should therefore be the focus of a globally active comparative literature that resolutely turns to the knowledge of coexistence in the world’s literatures.

The natural sciences have little to contribute to resolving armed conflicts and tensions. They stand for technological progress, with which the ethical and moral progress of humankind has never kept pace. This gives rise to areas of social relevance. In this area of human conflict, the world’s literatures form a unique treasure trove of possible behaviours and solutions, insofar as they are able to draw on a knowledge of life that has been transported over thousands of years (Ette Reference Ette2010). Precisely because these literatures cross languages, cultures and continents, they have developed a treasure trove of forms of conviviality that comparative literature must finally bring into the social discussion from a comparative perspective.

And because it is currently on the defensive, it must do this offensively. It is no secret that comparative literature is facing significant cutbacks in most Western countries, which are affecting the entire field of the humanities. It must therefore not withdraw into delicate niche topics and distinctive subjects and thus into an ivory tower, but must emphasize its social value and programmatically work out why it is indispensable in the concert of the sciences. In Western industrialized countries, student interest in comparative literature has declined, not least because its social relevance has remained unclear. While student interest in foreign-language literatures remains high in Latin America, and is declining significantly in the West, it continues to rise in China, for example. International comparative literature must face up to these new challenges and respond to them with a multipolar and multilogically oriented concept of the world’s literatures, rather than a Western-centred one.

For thousands of years, the literatures of the world, whether Chinese, Indian, Arabic or Western cultures, have sought to redefine – to use Erich Auerbach’s words – ‘man’s place in the universe’ (Auerbach 1967 [1952]: 310). This is because literature is research. The literatures of the world have demonstrated this from different perspectives and in doing so have constantly re-explored the potential places of human beings. The literatures of the world do indeed engage in profound research, even if this research is not located in a specific discipline and is thus disciplined. They do not develop the sciences alone, but a complex knowledge that goes far beyond the (Western) sciences. The question of the place of human beings focuses on their conviviality with nature and the environment, as this is an essential part of human coexistence knowledge.

In many respects, we are today on the verge of recklessly abandoning the literatures of the world and thus a significant part of humanity’s heritage. The constant reduction in the scope of literature in our current societies means no more and no less than this. Other artforms, such as film, music or painting, may also refer to this millennia-old human heritage, but only the world’s literatures are able to further develop and update this complexly condensed knowledge intertextually. Comparative literature must take an active part in this creative updating, which serves to visualize millennia-old knowledge, and programmatically bring the social benefits of this condensed form of the human spirit to the fore.

There is no question that the world’s literatures have always performed a seismographic function for their societies and continue to do so. The French cultural theorist and writer Roland Barthes (Reference Barthes2002: 167) once found an apt formulation for this: ‘La littérature est toujours en avance sur tout.’ The literatures of the world therefore function as a social early warning system that should serve as a guideline for broad-based comparative literature. Their relationship to society and its political and technological developments is characterized by a critical distance, as the literatures act as a corrective to current developments. This is what makes them so unpopular with all dictators and advocates of monological thinking. It is no coincidence that the persecution of writers has increased significantly again today. It is high time to bring the literatures of the world and the academic disciplines that deal with them closer together again: comparative literature cannot avoid following the polylogical literatures of the world in a creative way.

In a world in which, at first glance, literature counts less and less, it must emphasize its unique selling point: being the only form of human discourse that has actively expanded the realm of its knowledge over several millennia. Literature, so fragile and delicate, has far outlived the seemingly firmly established powers and political systems of its time, for it did not rely on resistance, but on defiance. Only comparative literature that draws on the most diverse literatures of the world is able to bring this uniqueness into focus and highlight its social relevance.

It must do so in a way that is internationally understandable and brings together a wide variety of languages. Periodicals and platforms of polylogically oriented comparative literature should provide immediately usable digital translation programs with the means of artificial intelligence to ensure that their research is accessible to a wide audience on our planet. This means nothing more and nothing less than ensuring that the world’s literatures, written in a wide variety of languages, are accompanied by academic publications that achieve a comparable linguistic diversity with the help of artificial intelligence and the rapidly growing possibilities of digital humanities.

Comparative literature and translation have always gone hand in hand. Free automatic translations on all platforms should guarantee the diversity of languages in comparative literature and avoid any restriction to English, for example. The comparative literature of the future will be interactive, multilingual and multilogical in order to avoid a shadowy existence as an orchid subject on the fringes of the sciences and to critically demonstrate the social relevance of its knowledge.