The goethean weltliteratur and its resonances in the founding of the first journal of comparative literature, "Acta comparationis litterarum universarum"
Keywords:
Weltliteratur, Comparative Literatures, translation, nationalism, cosmopolitismCopyright (c) 2022 Jesica Lenga
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.
Abstract
The aim of this paper is to investigate the various ways in which the complex tension between nationalism and cosmopolitanism is resolved in Goethe's project of Weltliteratur, one of the first deliberate attempts to forge a discipline dedicated to thinking literature in universal terms, acknowledged as the starting point for the genesis of Comparative Literatures, and in the manifestos of Acta Comparationis Litterarum Universarum (1877-1888) written by the Hungarian philologist and Germanist Hugo Metzl, in what was to become the first academic journal devoted to Comparative Literatures. It will also compare the policies regarding translation and literary exchange proposed in Goethe's and Metzl's programmatic texts. Finally, it will attempt to explain the shift from the concept of "World Literature" to "Comparative Literatures" as an attempt to prevent the culturally homogenising tendencies already latent at the end of the nineteenth century.
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