The aim of this essay is to examine how the study of world literature has decisively moved into a new postcolonial direction with the latest investigation of the unnamed Chinese novel on which Goethe formulates his much-quoted world literary imagination. He conceptualizes world literature as a subversive and aspirational imaginary in opposition to the increasingly dominant Hegelian world vision, on the one hand posing itself as an aesthetic cosmopolitanism opposed to French national politics, on the other hand destabilizing the calcifying Eurocentric hierarchy of cultures, languages, literatures, nations, and religions in the 1820s. This world literary imagination is inseparable from the long history of Orientalism, but its newness comes with a pioneering philological representation of China by French Orientalist Jean-Pierre Abel-Rémusat. I illustrate how a hybrid digital methodology in the intersection of German, translation, and postcolonial studies reveals the missing link between Orientalism, Goethe’s notion of world literature, and the Chinese novel.
Abstract
The aim of this essay is to examine how the study of world literature has decisively moved into a new postcolonial direction with the latest investigation of the unnamed Chinese novel on which Goethe formulates his much-quoted world literary imagination. He conceptualizes world literature as a subversive and aspirational imaginary in opposition to the increasingly dominant Hegelian world vision, on the one hand posing itself as an aesthetic cosmopolitanism opposed to French national politics, on the other hand destabilizing the calcifying Eurocentric hierarchy of cultures, languages, literatures, nations, and religions in the 1820s. This world literary imagination is inseparable from the long history of Orientalism, but its newness comes with a pioneering philological representation of China by French Orientalist Jean-Pierre Abel-Rémusat. I illustrate how a hybrid digital methodology in the intersection of German, translation, and postcolonial studies reveals the missing link between Orientalism, Goethe’s notion of world literature, and the Chinese novel.
关键词
world literature /
Goethe /
Jean-Pierre Abel-Rémusat /
sinology /
Orientalism
Key words
world literature /
Goethe /
Jean-Pierre Abel-Rémusat /
sinology /
Orientalism
{{custom_sec.title}}
{{custom_sec.title}}
{{custom_sec.content}}
参考文献
Apter, Emily (2013). Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability. London: Verso.
Beecroft, Alexander (2015). An Ecology of World Literature: From Antiquity to the Present Day. New York: Verso.
Bublies, Jutta (2013). “Wer liest denn heute noch Goethe?,” WAZ, 24 September 2013, https://www.waz.de/staedte/essen/wer-liest-denn-heute-noch-goethe-id8587515.html.
Collani, Claudia von (2007). “The First Encounter of the West with theYijing: Introduction to an Edition of Letters and Latin Translations by French Jesuits from the 18th Century.” Monumenta Serica 55,227-387.
Damrosch, David (2003). What Is World Literature? Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
——— (2009a). How to Read World Literature. West Sussex:Wiley-Blackwell.
——— (ed.) (2009b). Teaching World Literature. New York: Modern Language Association.
Damrosch, David, David L. Pike, April Alliston, Marshall Brown, Sabry Hafez, Djelal Kadir, Sheldon Pollock, Bruce Robbins, Haruo Shirane, Jane Tylus,Pauline Yu (eds.) (2009). Longman Anthology of World Literature. 2nd ed., 4 vols. New York: Pearson Longman.
Damrosch, David,Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (2011). “Comparative Literature/World Literature: A Discussion with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and David Damrosch.” Comparative Literature Studies 48.4, 455-485.
Davies, Martin L. (2016). “‘The Proper Study of Mankind’: Enlightenment and Tautology.” In Thinking about the Enlightenment: Modernity and Its Ramifications, ed. by Martin L. Davies, 227-269. London:Routledge.
Debon, Günther (1994). China zu Gast in Weimar: 18 Studien und Streiflichter. Heidelberg: Verlag Brigitte Guderjahn.
D’haen, Theo, David Damrosch,Djelal Kadir (eds.) (2012). The Routledge Companion to World Literature. New York: Routledge.
Dyck, Anne-Lise (2005). “La Chine hors de la philosophie: Essai de généalogie à partier des traditions sinologique et philosophieque française au XIXe siècle.”Extrême-Orient, Extrême-Occident 27, 13-47.
Eckermann, Johann Peter (1999). Gespräche mit Goethe in den letzten Jahren seines Lebens. Vol. 39 of Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Sämtliche Werke: Briefe, Tagebücher und Gespräche. Christoph Michel (ed.). Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag.
Elliott, Mark M. (2014). “Abel-Rémusat: La langue mandchoue et la sinologie.” Comptes Rendus des Séances de l'année 2, 973-993. https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/elliott/files/elliott_abelremusat_crai_2014.2.pdf. Accessed 22 August 2017.
Engels, Friedrich,Karl Marx (2005). The Communist Manifesto. Project Gutenberg, 25 January. http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/61/pg61-images.html. Accessed 22 August 2017.
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang (1993). Die letzten Jahre: Briefe, Tagebücher und Gespräche von 1823 bis zu Goethes Tod. Vol. 1ofSämtlicheWerke: Briefe, Tagebücher und Gespräche. Horst Fleig (ed.). Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag.
——— (1998). Mit Schiller: Briefe, Tagebücher und Gespräche vom 24. Juni 1794 bis zum 9. Mai 1805. Vol. 31 of Sämtliche Werke: Briefe, Tagebücher und Gespräche. Volker C. Dörr and Norbert Oellers (eds.). Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag.
——— (1999). Ästhetische Schriften 1824-1832. Vol. 22 of Sämtliche Werke: Briefe, Tagebücher und Gespräche. Anne Bohnenkamp (ed.). Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag.
Gupta, Suman (2009). Globalization and Literature. Cambridge: Polity.
Hegel, Georg W.F. (1975). Lectures on the Philosophy of World History. H. B. Nisbet (trans.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Helmreich, Christian (1999). “La traduction des ‘Souffrances du jeune Werther’ en France (1776-1850): Contribution à une histoire des transferts franco- allemands.” Revue Germanique Internationale 12, 179-193. https://rgi. revues.org/753. Accessed 22 August 2017.
Hill, Mark J. (2016). “Invisible Interpretations: Reflections on the Digital Humanities and Intellectual History.” Global Intellectual History 1.2,130-150.
Jodl, Friedrich (1901). “Goethe and Kant.” The Monist 11.2,258-266.
Kant, Immanuel (2006a). “An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?” In Toward Perpetual Peace and Other Writings on Politics, Peace, and History, ed. by Pauline Kleingeld, trans. by David L. Colclasure, 17-23. New Haven: Yale University Press.
——— (2006b). “Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Perspective.” In Toward Perpetual Peace and Other Writings on Politics, Peace, and History, ed. by Pauline Kleingeld, trans. by David L. Colclasure, 3-16. New Haven: Yale University Press.
——— (2006c). “Toward Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch.” In Toward Perpetual Peace and Other Writings on Politics, Peace, and History, ed. by Pauline Kleingeld, trans. by David L. Colclasure, 67-109. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Koh, Adeline (2017). “If Fanon had had Facebook: Postcolonial Knowledge, Rhizomes, and the Gnosis of the Digital.” In The Postcolonial World, ed. by Jyotsna G. Singh, and David Kim, 379-391. London:Routledge.
Kopper, John M. (2010). “How to Read World Literature, and: Teaching World Literature, and: The Longman Anthology of World Literature.” Comparative Literature Studies 47.3, 399-408.
Lionnet, Françoise,Emmanuel Bruno Jean-François (2016). “Literary Routes: Migration, Islands, and the Creative Economy.” PMLA 131.5, 1222-1238.
Lowrie, Michèle,Susanne Lüdemann (2015). “Introduction.” In Exemplarity and Singularity: Thinking through Particulars in Philosophy, Literature, and Law, ed. by Michèle Lowrie, and Susanne Lüdemann,1-15.New York: Routledge.
Ma,Ning(2017).TheAgeofSilver:TheRiseoftheNovelEastand West. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Magnin, Charles (1826). “Iu-Kaio-Li, ou Les Deux Cousine, roman chinois traduit par M. Abel Rémusat; précédé d’une preface où se trouve un parallèle des romans de la Chine et de ceux de l’Europe.” Le Globe 4.57, 299-301.
——— (1827). “Iu-Kaio-Li, ou Les Deux Cousine, roman chinois traduit par M. Abel Rémusat.” Le Globe 4.83, 438-440.
Mani, B. Venkat (2017). Recoding World Literature. New York: Fordham University Press.
Messling, Markus (2011). “Representation and Power: Jean-Pierre Abel-Rémusat’s Critical Chinese Philology.” Journal of Oriental Studies 44.1-2, 1-23.
Moretti, Franco (2000). “Conjectures on World Literature.”New Left Review 1, 54-68.
Mufti, Aamir R.(2016). Forget English! Orientalisms and World Literatures. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Nieves, Angel David,Siobhan Senier (2017). “Subaltern Archives, Digital Historiographies.” In The Postcolonial World, ed. by Jyotsna G. Singh, and David Kim, 363-378. London: Routledge.
Noyes, John K.(2016). “Eradicating the Orientalists: Goethe’s Chinesisch- deutsche Jahres- und Tageszeiten.” In China in the German Enlightenment, ed. by Bettina Brandt, and Daniel Leonhard Purdy, 142-164. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Nussbaum, Martha C.(2010). Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Park, Peter K.J. (2014). Africa, Asia, and the History of Philosophy. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Piper, Andrew (2006). “Rethinking the Print Object: Goethe and the Book of Everything.” PMLA 121.1, 124-139.
——— (2014). “The Wertherian Exotext: Topologies of Transnational Literary Circulation in the Long Eighteenth Century.” .txtLAB blog, 14 January. http://piperlab.mcgill.ca/pdfs/WertherEffectMLA2014.pdf.Accessed22 August 2017.
Pizer, John (2012). “Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Origins and Relevance of Weltliteratur.” In The Routledge Companion to World Literature, ed. by Theo D’haen, David Damrosch, and Djelal Kadir, 3-11. London: Routledge.
Purdy, Daniel (2014). “Goethe, Rémusat, and the Chinese Novel: Translation and the Circulation of World Literature.” In German Literature as World Literature, ed. by Thomas O. Beebee, 43-60. New York:Bloomsbury.
Risam, Roopika (2017). “Breaking and Building: The Case of Postcolonial Digital Humanities.” In The Postcolonial World, ed. by Jyotsna G. Singh, and David Kim, 345-362. London: Routledge.
Said, Edward W. (1994). Orientalism. New York: Vintage.
Saussy, Haun (1993). The Problem of a Chinese Aesthetic. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
——— (2001). Great Walls of Discourse and Other Adventures in Cultural China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Schultz, Helga (1996). “Mythos und Aufklärung: Frühformen des Nationalismus in Deutschland.” Historische Zeitschrift 263.1, 31-67.
Schutjer, Karin (2007). “German Epic/Jewish Epic: Goethe’sExodusNarrative in Hermann und Dorothea and ‘Israel in der Wüste.’” German Quarterly 80.2, 165-184.
Stark, Sam (2013). “What Happens in Wahlheim: Stanley Corngold’s ‘The Sufferings of Young Werther.’” Los Angeles Review of Books, 15 April. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/what-happens-in-wahlheim-stanley-corngolds-the-sufferings-of-young-werther/. Accessed 22 August 2017.
Thoms, Peter Perring (1824). Chinese Courtship in Verse. London: Parbury, Allen, and Kingsbury.
——— (1827). Contes Chinois. Jean-Pierre Abel-Rémusat (ed.). Paris: Moutardier.
Tsu, Jing (2010). “Getting Ideas about World Literature in China.” Comparative Literature Studies 47.3, 290-317.
Venuti, Lawrence (2008). The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2008.
PDF(1822 KB)
