Bland New Global

No more than a few years ago, world literature theorists, such as David Damrosch, assumed that there was a drawn out process whereby an author would slowly move from a reading public in their native language into the larger global markets outside their own country. There would be stages whereby an author became a member of world literature; this movement unfolded slowly, maybe not with a Hegelian sense of historical time, but definitely not right away, and certainly not so that authors would start writing their fiction with an eye toward the “world literary market,” rather than their own native readers.

Turns out this process can be sped up, so that novels, poems, plays are now written for the world English reader, rather than for just the few million people who speak whatever language other than English is your native tongue. Makes sense, of course. Why pretend that world literature is a pantheon for the famous dead? You don’t have to be the aged Goethe in order to see yourself among that crowd.

Tim Parks complains that this automatic “worldization” produces inauthentic literature written for the general reader:

http://blogs.nybooks.com/post/379987448/the-dull-new-global-novel

Sounds like a problem but it surely is not the first time that authors are writing for a market outside their own vernacular? How stable is the category of the vernacular to begin with? Aren’t the same forces that produce global English, also transforming the other languages?

That the bland novel may now exist on a global scale is surely not surprising. Just start reading the experimental, hard-to-translate worldly literature. Global literary markets may produce a new kind of dullness, a new sort of meaninglessness, but it just as readily presents opportunities for new experimentation and disruption of these emerging stereotypes.