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WHAT IS WORLD LITERATURE? By David Damrosch.Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. xiii + 324 pp. Cloth $65.00, paper $19.95. "He has taken all culture for his province," Randall Jarrell wrote of Ezra Pound, "and is naturally a little provincial about it." It is a good joke, and will bear some analysis. How could Pound, an American who was interested in the old and new literatures of Europe as well as those of ancient China and more recent Japan, be provincial? If Pound was provincial, who wasn't? The implied answer, of course, lies in the approach. Pound wasn't provincial about the works he chose to read, only about the way he chose to read them. Something of the same suspicion of provinciality attaches itself, for many of us, to the idea of world literature. We fall in love, in David Damrosch's phrase, "with a body of work from another time and place" (158), and we keep falling in love with different works and bodies of work. We love the literature of the world (love much of what we have managed to read of it, in its first language or in translation), but we are not sure world literature is
Comparative Literature Studies – Penn State University Press
Published: Mar 4, 2004
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