German Literature as World Literature

Thomas Oliver Beebee is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Comparative Literature and German at Penn State University, USA. He is the author of Millennial Literatures of the Americas, 1492-2002 (Oxford University Press, 2008), Epistolary Fiction in Europe (Cambridge University Press, 1999), The Ideology of Genre: A Comparative Study of Generic Instability (Penn State Press, 1994) and Clarissa on the Continent: Translation and Seduction (Penn State Press, 1990).

Part 1 is recommended particularly for Goethe scholars and is of interest more generally as an exploration of the tradition of intersections that Beebee discusses in his “World-Literature Model” … the second part offers a wealth of expertise on how individual modern authors helped shape the concept of world literature … German Literature as World Literature is a must read for Germanists who study modern literature and other scholars interested in the concepts of national literary canons and world literature. Readers will benefit greatly from this highly rewarding collection.

• ContributorsAcknowledgmentsNote on the TextIntroduction: Departures, Emanations, IntersectionsPart One: Goethe’s Weltliteratur/World LiteratureChunjie Zhang, University of California, Davis, USA, “Reading Goethe’s Elective Affinities (Die Wahlverwandtschaften) through The Story of the Stone (Hong Lou Meng): Immanent Divinity, Vegetative Femininity, and the Mood of Transience”Daniel Purdy, Penn State University, USA, “Goethe, Rémusat and the Chinese Novel: Translation and the Circulation of World Literature”Part Two: Ausstrahlungen/EmanationsSimona Moti, Kalamazoo College, USA, “Between Political Engagement and Political Unconscious: Hugo von Hofmannsthal and the Slavic East”Kathleen L. Komar, University of California, Los Angeles, USA “Rainer Maria Rilke: German Speaker, World Author”Martina Kolb, Pennsylvania State University, USA “Bertolt Brecht — Homme du Monde: Exile, Verfremdung, and Weltliteratur”David Kim, Michigan State University, USA “Militant Melancholia, or Remembering Historical Traumas: W. G. Sebald’s Die Ringe des Saturn”Part Three: Schnittmengen/IntersectionsThomas O. Beebee, Pennsylvania State University, USA “From Nobel to Nothingness: The Negative Monumentality of Rudolf C. Eucken and Paul Heyse”Paul Nissler, Stanford University, USA “A Short Survey of the Creation and Development of Common German-Latin American Space: Humboldt, Emigration, Exile and Contemporary Interaction”Elke Sturm-Trigonakis, University of Heidelberg, Germany “Contemporary German-Based Hybrid Texts as a New World Literature”BibliographyIndex