Against World Literature: The Debate in Retrospect

Saint Jerome in His Study, Caravaggio (1605-1606)

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What does a critic oppose, exactly, when she takes a stand “against worldliterature”? Emily Apter takes that polemic as the title of her latest book (Verso,2013), but she uses it to advance a thesis that requires no argument at all:Something always gets lost in translation. Apter argues that the truth in that clichéis overlooked by contemporary critics, with their “entrepreneurial, bulimic drive toanthologize and curricularize the world’s cultural resources.” Valuing efficiency overexactitude, these antagonists read The Divine Comedy as a perfect replica of Divina

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“Against World Literature”: The Debatein Retrospect

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Commedia, and they teach others to repeat their error. To slow their progress, Apterproposes the idea of “the Untranslatable,” and she assembles a list of words thatillustrate it— fado, for example, Cyclopedia, checkpoint. She traces the meaningsthat get lost when these words are conveyed to rough synonyms in other languages,testifying to the “quality of militant semiotic intransigence” that inheres inlanguage more generally.

But she leaves unnamed the critics who fly too swiftly to worry over such subtlethings. And names seem necessary, because the scholars most closely associatedwith world literature—Pascale Casanova, David Damrosch, Djelal Kadir, FrancoMoretti, Rebecca Walkowitz—have written substantially on the interpretiveproblems translation poses. Damrosch devotes a full chapter to them in hispedagogical text, How to Read World Literature, and he cites translation theory onthe first page of the introduction to The Routledge Companion to World Literature.Such efforts to theorize translation might arguably be called inadequate, but thoseinadequacies would have to be filed under ‘not for lack of trying.’ Apter makes noreference to this body of work on translation and world literature, so she assertswithout evidence that she is alone in her recognition of “the importance ofnon-translation, mistranslation, incomparability and untranslatability.”

That rhetorical gesture of critique lacks any critical content, but it worksnonetheless as a frame for Apter’s strong analyses of “world literature,” which is tosay, literary texts from a variety of times and places. So, while Apter pretends to fireagainst world literature like an enemy, she leans against it like a plank on a wall tojoin a critical conversation where these questions have only one good answer: Can atranslation replicate its original exactly (no), and should we worry about that (yes)?Apter confronts those worries directly to study the circulation of world literature asDamrosch defines it, tracing the ways that “a literary work manifests differentlyabroad than it does at home.” In that context, her textual analyses are robbed of


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their stated raison d’être, but their richness suggests some other raison that works inits place, which prompts me to ask: What is Emily Apter really against, what is shereally for, and why does she invoke world literature to make that case?

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“World literature” is as heavily freighted as any of Apter’s Untranslatables, andmany of its common usages have only slight relation to literary texts. It has workedhistorically to map the lines of inheritance—cultural and otherwise—that separatehigh from low, smart from dumb, timeless from temporary, haves from have-nots.When Goethe invoked weltliteratur in the early nineteenth century, it was toimagine how German poetry would supersede other nations’ to become “theuniversal possession of mankind, revealing itself everywhere and at all times inhundreds and hundreds of men.” That assertion of the global value of local goodswas built into weltliteratur from the start, and Karl Marx borrowed the termdecades later to theorize the economic value Goethe implied. For Marx, worldliterature was a cultural effect of economic compulsion, a testimony to the marketimperative that “chases the bourgeoisie over the surface of the whole globe,”compelling them to “nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connectionseverywhere.”

World literature still connotes an expansionary move that is distinctly capitalistic,and Apter makes that connotation work for her purposes. Addressing an audiencethat imagines the university in opposition to corporate interests, she yokes thescholarly impulse to “anthologize” and “curricularize” to the imperative to monetizethat chased Marx’s bourgeoisie across their national borders. Establishing that looserhyme between world literature and the economic processes of globalization, sheframes her argument about Untranslatables as a critique of them both, although shedoes not address any economic questions directly. She renders herself an occupier


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of Wall Street—and an opponent of corporate influence in higher education—without leaving the subject of literary theory.

She claims its extra-literary implications in part by obscuring the differencesbetween the various registers in which world literature works—the commercial, theliterary, and the curricular. And that is significant, because the contemporarymeaning of the term depends greatly upon who uses it. To a publisher, KhaledHosseini’s The Kite Runner (2003) is a great work of world literature, not leastbecause it is a bestseller. A literary critic or novelist will object, citing instead worksby writers with the aesthetic craft of J. M. Coetzee, Kazuo Ishiguro, HarukiMurakami, or Orhan Pamuk. An academic will frame the debates about worldliterature partly in terms of where and how to teach it, and few others care aboutthat. But by leaving these various uses of the term entangled, Apter swings broadlyat all of them for their “reflexive endorsement of cultural equivalence andsubstitutability, or toward the celebration of nationally and ethnically branded‘differences’ that have been niche-marketed as commercialized ‘identities’.” Nocredible scholar could like world literature by this definition, because it iseverything that a university and its inhabitants are not supposed to be: politicallynaive, theoretically unenlightened, and crucially caught up in the business ofmaking money. Apter finds parts of the university that seem proximal to globalcapital and the inequities it creates, and she isolates herself and her audience fromthem by locating them under the banner of “world literature.”

As she argues against them, she vents prevailing anxieties about the worth ofintellectual labor in the contemporary U.S., where worth that is hard to calculate indollars becomes hard to calculate at all. In this context, critical debates about worldliterature become legible as debates about the literary critic’s best defense againstthe very American suspicion that our work is a luxury good. Both proponents andcritics of world literature stake claims implicitly for literature’s utility to a global


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economy and a globalized world, suggesting that the practice of reading literarytexts from faraway places might foster the cross-cultural understanding on whichtransnational traffic depends, perhaps, or somehow slow the motion of capitalism’sgaping maw.

That is a lot to expect from literature of any sort. And because those expectationsunderwrite the debate about world literature, the critics who enter into it weigh inalso on the good that literature might do in the world, balancing grand gestureswith knowing shrugs. The editors of the literary magazine n+1 capture thatopposition tidily in a long and contentious article published under the title “WorldLite” that reprises Apter’s title without naming her as an ally. Writing collectivelyin the wearied voice of a protagonist post-bildung, the editors frame worldliterature as “a nice idea” that must be trimmed to fit “a sick, sad world.” “The wordliterature itself has come to sound fake,” they muse, wondering whether there is“something the addition of world is making up for, a blemish it’s trying to conceal?”That stain is feared to have economic contours, because a global literary canon“can’t help but reflect global capitalism in its triumph, inequalities, anddeformations.” Indeed, but so what? By all of its definitions, world literature isabout as bound up with the economic conditions as other cultural phenomena—which is to say, completely. A critic who asks whether world literature reflectsglobal capital asks a question that is as drearily easy to answer as the question ofwhether some literary meaning gets lost in translation. And on both subjects, thoseone-word affirmations mask much better questions like where, how much, to whoseadvantage, and in what way.

The n+1 editors join Apter in the activity of raising and avoiding those questions,but they make more concrete progress, partly because their interest in the definitionof world literature is more than passing. The article’s only footnote states theeditors’ intention to use a capital W and L to “refer to a publishing category and


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object of academic study; this is in contrast to the ‘world literature’ that would beeverything ever written in all languages.” A necessary clarification, this definitionposits world literature as a finite set of texts that spans popular and literary fiction.And that it is a canon of complicity with Citibank and its beneficiaries, the n+1editors argue, more redolent of capitalism’s “triumphs” than its “deformities.” Toillustrate the point, they name names: V.S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, J.M. Coetzee,Kiran Desai, Mohsin Hamid, Chimananda Ngozi Adichie, Michael Ondaatje, andOrhan Pamuk. They read this body of work as “an empty vessel for the occasionalself-ratification of a global elite.” And who could like that?

But if world literature helps the rich to stay that way, then it must do so bycanonizing texts that somehow further entrench the economic and political statusquo—but how, exactly, does not emerge with any clarity from the n+1 editors’ list.Most readers will admire some authors on it much more than others and wonderwhat common fault binds them together. They take a shared interest in theEuropean tradition of the realist novel, perhaps, and they have biographies thatbegin in wealthy strata of nations not known for great wealth; they are left leaningand politically provocative to some people in the world, but not to many Westernreaders of literary fiction. None of these arguments are made in “World Lite”although all are arguable, and the most obvious commonality that holds thesewriters together is their global success. But it seems tautological to complain thatthe most successful authors are the most accessible, or the most heavily invested inthe status quo.

The n+1 editors note one surprising commonality among these non-Americanwriters, and it resonates meaningfully with Apter’s argument: All of these writersenjoy a close relationship to an American university. “Every World Lit writer seemsto have an appointment” as faculty somewhere, the editors observe, and collegecampuses figure prominently in many of the novels they write; at the turn of the


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twenty-first century, “the university becomes the key institution in the creation ofWorld Literature.” To explain this undue influence of American college life onworld literature, the n+1 editors gesture toward an earlier generation of “academictheorists of hybridity, the postcolonial, and World Literature.” These scholarsopened institutional doors by lending literary writers “from the global south anauthority that no longer emanated from themselves.” And if this authority musthave enriched the writers, it must have damaged their work, since “the universityalways threatens to insulate World Lit from the world it wants to describe andaddress.” From this premise, the argument against world literature becomes legibleas an argument against university literature, which is a very different thing.

And the difference has political implications, as Poorva Rajaram and MichaelGriffith argued in a critical response to “World Lite” in the Indian newsorganization Tehelka. If global capital “is responsible for eliding the local,” theyargue, “then so is any cultural criticism that sees the whole world and all its writersas a valuable unit of analysis.” In that context, Rajaram and Griffith see the rise ofuniversity novels among non-American novelists as a refreshingly honest departurethat frees privileged people from all over the world to write what they know. “Wewill happily choose experience-based novels set in universities,” they write, “over atransnational literary elite that insists on ventriloquising the poor.” Accusing then+1 editors of fetishizing the politics of less privileged others, they raise a rhetoricalplea: “When will certain strands of the left stop requiring the high-culture novelsthey love or hate to spark off revolutions?” That is a wish that world literature andthe debates around it might not be asked to do so much extra-literary work.

But that wish will not come true. Critical debates about world literature reflect theconcerns of an academy that is both privileged and marginal—and it is deeplyambivalent about both of those things. Literary critics need money to buy the timeit takes to look at capitalist structures and critique the violence they inflict on the


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rest of the world, not to mention the crassness with which capitalism dismisses ourwork. And if the quickness of that dismissal stings our collective ego, it alsounderwrites the terms of our academic freedom, since our wars against windmillsseem unlikely to inflict much damage. It is in that context that Emily Apter reflectsher position as a tenured professor at NYU when she frames her work onUnstranslatables as “anti-capitalist critique.” It puts philosophical pressure on whatit means to “‘have’ a literature,” she writes, “or to make claim to aesthetic property”as nations and languages do. This figurative use of ‘to have’ is trusted to enjoy adirect relationship with possession in a literal sense, as Apter sees her inquiry intolinguistic ownership as a study also of the economic structures of a globalizedworld. That enables her to claim that her work has tangible if indirect effects onpeople far beyond the university’s walls.

That is a tenuous claim, and the n+1 editors make it, too. The editors place implicittrust in literature to make the world a better place, provided that “literature” isgood by their definition. To define it, they contrast the world literature they dislikewith a “thorny internationalism” they would like better, because it is more inclinedtoward words like “opposition, project, and most embarrassingly truth.” Populatedby writers like Elena Ferrante, Kirill Medvedev, and Yan Lianke, this canon wouldbe more engaged with worldly realities, and it would be more “radical” by somedefinition. But that definition remains unstated, leaving a reader to wonder how itfits the aesthetics or politics of Ferrante’s harrowing Days of Abandonment (2005)but not to Coetzee’s also harrowing Disgrace (1999), just to take one example fromeach list. Another adjective that could describe the n+1 canon is avant-garde, as theeditors argue implicitly that relative difficulty plus obscurity equals a revolutionarypotential by necessity.

But there is a logical fallacy that has ethical implications in this elision of themetaphor that makes intellectual work stand in for something else that could


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plausibly put food on a table. Apter agrees with me about this in some moments,and when she does, she stands in opposition to most of her own work. In her studyof Untranslatables, she asserts the need to retain the first meanings of the wordsthat structure global capital—checkpoint, for example—against the theoreticalusages that render the discourse of borders “an all-purpose, ubiquitous way oftalking about translation.” Apter argues forcefully against that kind of substitutionwith her reading of work by the Palestinian artist Khaled Jarrar, who has performedthe ritual of border crossing by checking passports and stamping pages in locationswhere he has no particular authority, and no border is crossed, like the RamallahCentral Bus Station. “I want to welcome people, as a Palestinian, to Palestine,” hesaid, and to “provoke the whole idea of a state.” By performing a checkpoint himselfin a place where no nation demands one, Jarrar questions the authority of the stateand the occupation; he asks who has the power to maintain national boundaries,through what means, at what cost, by what violence. Apter recounts thisperformance to align her project with Jarrar’s recovery of the literal meaning of“border-crossing,” and to locate herself outside of an academic discourse where any“purchase on the politics of actual borders—whether linguistic or territorial—hasbeen attenuated.” This is an argument about the degree to which the theoreticaldiscourse that uses borders as a metaphor pertains to people who actually crossborders between nations and states.

It seems obvious to me that the degree of its pertinence is zero, and therefore notworth discussion—but Apter’s equivocation speaks to a discomfort that is pervasiveamong literary critics in the U.S. We know that we live in a world where millions ofpeople become refugees annually, and national borders witness all manner ofviolence and humiliation, so it can hardly be ethical to strip these terms of their firstmeanings—and, yet, we remain susceptible to well-turned metaphors, and we areglad to have the time that global capital affords us to enjoy them. Apter voices thatambivalence when she writes that Jarrar speaks to her “unease” and “worry” when


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he “raises the issue of how legal, territorial markers are used figuratively intranslation theory.” In fact, Jarrar doesn’t engage directly with translation theory atall; if his work “raises issues” about the internecine fights among scholars, it raisesthem from the outside, as a conversation about apples might raise issues aboutoranges by indirection. It says literally nothing about the borders that distinguishwords in books, or scholars in universities.

In her self-contradiction, Apter wrestles with the question that world literature’sadvocates and opponents raise together whenever they talk about it: How muchshould literary critics trust the metaphors we use to bind our work to materialrealities, and how can we engage most meaningfully with a world that seemstroubled but unable to speak our language very well? Gayatri Spivak addresses thosequestions more convincingly for me than either Apter or the n+1 editors, and sheaddresses them when she argues against world literature, too. She locates herliterary work at a far remove from the any project that confronts global inequality.To fill that distance with “substance would take us into the UN and internationalNGOs,” she argues, “the real players in a dominant feminist collectivity crossingborders—activist comparatism today. The obvious gap between the two cannot befilled by only academic labor.” That gap may be obvious to Spivak, but it is notobvious at all in most arguments about world literature, which are laced withanother set of concerns entirely. When we align ourselves for and against it, westake claims that sound too good to be true about the benefits we bring tonon-fictional people on the other side of the world.

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Against World Literature: The Debate in Retrospect

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