A Critique Of The Dynamics Of Literature And Power

Though not a literary theoretician in the strict sense,Pascale Casanova,the literary sociologist has laboriously come up with a conjecture on world literature in The World Republic of Letters which has produced great impact and aroused a new round of heated worldwide discussion among those who are committed to the study of relationships between national literatures.While in China,academic attention to Casanova is mainly confined to the fields of comparative literature and translation studies.Most of her academic ideas are scattered in various papers on the study of translational literature,existing usually in the form of quotations.On the whole,whether at home or abroad,few papers are devoted to the specialized study of Casanova's conception of world literature.According to the available resources,there are different opinions on Casanova's conjecture.The people who support her basically hold the similar attitudes,while those who question her are widely divergent on opinions.Based on their difference on the position,the latter can be divided into two camps: Europe and non-Europe.Most of the European scholars question the assertion of Casanova that France enjoys a more advantageous place than other European nations in terms of literary capital,while scholars outside Europe almost invariably accuse it of being a form of Eurocentrism.Although both camps have different appeals,they are suspected of seeking interests in their own favor.Their attitudes towards world literature are also reduced to a stance of a perspectivism based on nationalism,similar to that held by Casanova.It should be noted that some,but not very few,scholars who speak for “small literatures” even take an ambiguous attitude towards Casanova's conception of world literature.Certain measures provided by Casanova prove indeed expedient,but it is after all not a long-term plan.Not only that,but they may also fall into her trap,indirectly admitting that she is right about the supposition that there is the existence of literary distinction between the center and periphery,geographically,although this is not necessarily her subjective intention as she suggests.In view of this,this dissertation is going to revisit the logic operation behind Casanova's conception of world literature,in an attempt to expose that the adoption of a mode of sociological research writing is nothing more than to create an objectivist logic deduction,whose real purpose is to smuggle in a well wrapped,but cleverly disguised,exclusive nationalism,and hence the reassertion of the original western logic in disguise,so as to emphasize on the literary distinction in the world literary space.This dissertation consists of an introduction,a conclusion and a main body which is subdivided into 4 chapters.The introduction covers five parts of contents.The first part of it is devoted to a brief introduction of Casanova's life background and an overview of her major works;Part 2 carries out an archaeological tracking down of the evolvement of world literature as the concept;Part 3 offers a critical literature review of Casanova's conception of world literature both at home and abroad;Part 4 points out the insufficiency in the current research on Casanova's conception of world literature,and proceeds from it to put forward the urgency and importance of the research on this subject,thus materializing the formation of this dissertation;and finally,the introduction brings up the basic framework of the dissertation.Chapter 1 demonstrates how literary nationalism evolves into an exclusive literary nationalism which in turn plays a foundational role in the edifice of Casanova's conception of world literature.Specifically,this form of exclusivism is determined,yet has to be inferred,by the way Casanova delivers the relation between literature and nationalism,and the attitude she assumes towards the practice of translation of literary texts.Chapter 2 focuses on how Casanova's conception of literary nationalism has succeeded in establishing a universal model of a form of objectivism for literary development by fully mobilizing the three so-called neutral concepts such as economy,modernity and literary autonomy.Analysis of this mobilization confirms that the logical thinking of Casanova is nothing more than a disguised reassertion of the old western logic.Chapter 3 is an attempt to explain that Casanova's center-periphery paradigm is actually a kind of conjecture that treats the world literary space as a literary field where literatures are located either in the central pole of it or in the periphery pole of it.The relationship between the central pole and the periphery pole is aesthetically one in the first hand of the dependent and the depended,and then secondarily that of rivals,with the literary modernity,usually held as originated from the center,serving as the criterion to measure the aesthetic value.Chapter 4,the last chapter of this dissertation,a general response to the problematic logic thinking of Casanova revealed in the previous three chapters,demonstrates the coexistence of multiple literary centers in the world literary space and the long-standing conflicts of literary interpretations,rendering invalid thus the theoretical basis of the literary distinction of the center from the periphery emphasized by Casanova in the name of the universality.With this settled,the remaining task for the so-called small literatures is to build their own discourse system and cultivate the necessary and beneficial literary system.The conclusion briefly summarizes the main arguments of the dissertation,generalizing the problematics of Casanova's logic thinking in her conception of world literature and pointing out the solution for the literary development of the so-called small literatures that are temporarily in the unfavorable situation.In short,Casanova forges a logical rehearsal of objectivism by adopting descriptive means usually used in sociological research and mobilizing the neutral concepts such as economy,modernity and literary autonomy,in an attempt to build up the conception of world literature.But as the analysis unfolds,this conception of world literature turns out to be a reassertion that the West is superior to the East in terms of literature.However,like her logical thinking,this supposition of literary distinction is very problematic in that the world literary space is one of multiple centers.The possibility of that distinction as Casanova describes is after all attributed to the fact that the right of interpretation of literature and concepts related to it has not be possessed by small literatures(in the words of Casanova).Therefore,the solution for literary development of small literatures is still in their hands as long as they hasten their paces to build up their own literary discourse and cultivate their own literary system.