1. Hafta/ Week 1: Retrospective

Alexander Beecroft

“World literature without a hyphen: towards a typology of literary systems”

New Left Review 54, November-December 2008, pp.87-100

• Outline:

- Introduction: “World” as an adjective versus “world” as a noun – Existing theories in social sciences and humanities

- Analysis and critique of two specific models: Moretti and Casanova

- Offering an alternative organizing principle: A six-moded structure that accounts for the relationship between literatures and environments

- Conclusion: Final structural suggestions

• Class discussion:

The main points covered in the short discussion of this article mostly dealt with the ways in which Beecroft suggests a new approach to literature and, accordingly, the efficiency of his categorizations. As I will point out more in detail in the “Criticism” section, it may be argued that, with his six pairing categories, he has relapsed into Wallerstein’s structure where there are three main systems. However, the recognition of dissimilar but chronologically overlapping literary categories or rather modes of literary interaction certainly leaves more room for more argumentative flexibility and hence creates a theoretical environment where simplistic –and mostly Eurocentric approaches to “world literature” can be more easily and meaningfully challenged. On a very personal note, I like the linguistic/terminological approach to the problem of literary Eurocentrism.

• Summary:

In his endeavor to come up with a much more encompassing definition of ‘literature’ in terms of both time and space covered, Beecroft takes on Wallerstein’s world-systems theory to point out to the problems within the current literary scholarship in its approach to the definition of literature. Wallerstein, like Beecroft, questions the relevance and “usefulness of the nation-state as the proper unit of analysis,” and suggests instead a historical approach, which allows him to describe three different ‘world-systems’ that have existed:

1) the mini-system of the pre-modern world, geographically limited in scope;

2) the world-empire, such as Rome or Han-dynasty China, ‘a large bureaucratic structure with a single political center and an axial division of labor, but multiple cultures’;

3) and a world-economy, such as that in place in modern times, which is ‘a large axial division of labor with multiple political centers and multiple cultures’. (87)

Nevertheless, Beecroft argues that Wallerstein falls into a power-dependent approach in his utilization of the word ‘world’ as a noun in the term ‘world-system’, a utilization that would, according to Beecroft, also explain “one of the unspoken assumptions most writers on world literature seem to have taken from Wallerstein, namely that world-literature (to restore the hyphen Wallerstein might demand) is not the sum total of the world’s literary production, but rather a world-system within which literature is produced and circulates.” (88)

Along with Wallerstein’s idea that there should be a power-center regulating the world-system, comes an “axial division of labor,” where the periphery is very much dependent on the center in terms of survival. In his objection to such a structure, Beecroft argues that the word ‘world’ should instead be used as an adjective in a way to include, within the definition of literature, all of the texts that have been composed as literature, that is, what he calls, as mentioned earlier, the sum total of the world’s literary production.

It is on those grounds that Beecroft undertakes a criticism of Pascale Casanova and Franco Moretti, accusing the former for “reserving higher-order and higher-value work for core cultures,” and the latter for “core specialists within the field of literary study (located, naturally, within the academic centers of those same core cultures).” (88) To be more precise, Beecroft criticizes Casanova for failing to account for the non-European world before 1945, thus, for being too limited both spatially and chronologically. Another shortcoming of Casanova’s approach for Beecroft is that she does not necessarily develop a critical approach towards the role of Paris as the literary capital of the world and the ultimate value-adder/recognizer for any literary work. As a matter of fact, her theory remains very much Euro-centric in her uncritical admission that “[p]eripheral production is only of value once recognized by the center.” (89)

As for Moretti, even though his theory is put forward as “a less innocent vision of the relationship between literary and economic systems,” (89) it is still centered around the core/periphery relations and is too genre-dependent. In other words, Moretti tries to come up with a systemization of world-literature by looking only into the major genres of the Western literary tradition, mainly the novel, and also to a certain extent, the sonnet. Beecroft, on the other hand, is in search for a much less reductionist approach to literature, since he thinks Moretti’s theory leaves out a remarkably big part of the world’s literary production, and is disturbingly simplistic in its vision of literary theory.

“In either case,” Beecroft remarks, “each of these models has the perhaps unintended effect of re-inscribing a hegemonic center, even as their avowed desire is to globalize literary studies.” (88) As a hegemony-free and genre-independent alternative to those two models, Beecroft suggests a six-moded structure as a possible classificatory approach to what he terms ‘world literature’, with an aim to grasp “the multiplicity of strategies used by literatures to relate to their political and economic environments,” and to “recognize the multiple centers and systems of cultural power.” (91) He suggests that “the shifting configuration of the relationship between literatures and environments forms the most useful object of study for a future ‘word literature without a hyphen’,” the central term ‘environment’ being borrowed from Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory. (92) Beecroft thinks of literatures as ‘subsystems’, which are encircled within ‘environments’ and which “recognize distinctions within their environments” but is only “selectively interconnected with [them].” (91, emphasis added)

The multiplication of categories certainly helps Beecroft’s theory as to appearing more careful about the easy simplifications and about the common tendency of a Eurocentric explication of ‘world-literature’. Indeed, he rightfully points out that “[p]rofound theoretical insights can and must come from the study of diverse literatures, rather than from the study of a core tradition or from the work of a dedicated class of theoreticians exempted from the cultural labor of textual analysis.” (91) However, his structure based on six categorical sections (i.e. epichoric, panchoric, cosmopolitan, vernacular, national and global) is not without some problems, as I will point out in the next section.

• Criticism:

1) The sections interestingly seem to be better grasped in pairs; the epichoric text is most immediately related to the panchoric, whereas the cosmopolitan is best made sense of in relation to the vernacular; and finally, the concept of global literature is mainly based on the national. In that sense, it is possible to argue that Beecroft falls back into Wallerstein’s theory; in other words, a parallelism can be easily drawn with the latter’s three main historical categories and the former’s three paired sets; i.e. epichoric/panchoric, cosmopolitan/vernacular, and national/global. The only addition on Beecroft part is, in that case, the suggestion that those different categories might exist synchronically.

2) His appropriation of Luhmann’s terminology is vague and confusing. Beecroft poses “the relationship between literature and its environment,” as the main problem in relation to defining ‘world literature,’ and creates his categories based on this assumption; however, he does not elaborate the significance of this relationship, which seem to create a disturbing thematic shift between the first and the second part of the article.

3) His criticism of Casanova and Moretti’s theories, as much as it makes sense on the level of a debunking of West-centered approaches, seems to be simplistic and somewhat distorting. Not having read Casanova’s The World Republic of Letters, I find it hard to believe that she would be as naïve and non-critical of the structure she writes about as Beecroft presents her. When it comes to Moretti, on the other hand, Beecroft does not seem to beyond his ideas concerning the adoption of the novel genre by non-Western literatures and hence, he ends up replicating the center/periphery relation rather than debunking it. In fact, he admits that “the larger-scale absorption of European ideas of the nation and of national literature mirrors to some extent the absorption of the European literary form of the novel.” (98)

4) Beecroft’s model fails, in my opinion, to come up with a practical suggestion about the possible ways to go beyond the nation-state on an institutional level. The question of how we are to reorganize the literary academia on the basis of this new categorization remains indeed unanswered.

-Zeynep