WorldLiteratureinTheoryandPractice预案.docVIP

World Literature in Theory and Practice “The age of world literature is at hand,” the 77-year-old Johann Wolfgang von Goethe proclaimed to his young disciple Eckermann in 1827, “and everyone must strive to hasten its approach.” Were he to survey the scene today, Goethe would likely feel that his prophecy has come true, but he might wonder whether he’d gotten more than he’d bargained for. Goethe hoped that the age of world literature would be an era of international exchange and mutual refinement, a cosmopolitan process in which Germany would assume a central role as a translator and mediator among cultures, leading an international elite to champion lasting literary values against the vanities of narrow nationalism and the vagaries of popular taste. It is hard to imagine that he would have been pleased with the books recently on offer at the gift shop of Ho Chi Minh’s Residence in Hanoi. There wasn’t a copy of Faust or even Confucius’s Analects in sight; in their place, a guide to the Residence in Chinese was sandwiched between two volumes in Vietnamese: a cartoon life of Abraham Lincoln, and a collection of children’s stories, whose glossy cover boasted a leering Tigger and a roly-poly Pooh, taken from the Disney film. The Disneyfication of the globe was not exactly the future toward which Goethe wanted everyone to strive. “世界文学的时代即将来临，”77岁的约翰沃尔夫冈冯歌德宣布他的年轻弟子的1827，“每个人都必须努力加速它的方法。”他到现场调查，今天，歌德可能觉得他的预言成真了，但他可能不知道他已经比他预料的。歌德希望世界文学时代将国际交流与相互细化的时代，其中德国将承担核心作用在文化翻译和中介性过程，导致持久的文学价值冠军反对狭隘的民族主义的虚荣和大众口味变幻莫测的国际精英。很难想象他会高兴的书最近提供在河内胡志明故居礼品店。没有一份浮士德甚至孔子的论语在眼前；在他们的地方，在中国的住宅导向夹在越南两卷之间：亚伯拉罕林肯的卡通人生，和收集的儿童故事，它的封面有一个色迷迷的跳跳虎和小熊维尼不倒翁，从迪士尼电影。全球的迪斯尼是不是未来走向的歌德要大家努力。 What are we to make of world literature today? The cultural and political realignments of the past two decades have opened the field of world literature to an unprecedented, even vertiginous variety of authors and countries. At once exhilarating and unsettling, the range and variety of literatures now in view raise serious