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Comparative Literature Studies, Volume 47, Number 3, 2010, pp. 396-399

(Review)

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DOI: 10.1353/cls.2010.0029

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/cls/summary/v047/47.3.damrosch.html

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 396 COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES

of their literary inheritance and the Christian hedonism of their religious

tradition as involuntary absorption or unconscious internalization of
foreign influence. In the same light, we can appreciate the innocence of
Xu Guangqi, one of the three Christian disciples converted by Ricci, who
reported in his 1616 memorial to the Chinese emperor about over thirty
ideal countries in the West that were modeled after the Chinese utopia
大同 [grand union]. As an East-West comparative study, the book’s research
has perhaps relied too heavily on English data in Western libraries. The
reader’s understanding of Chinese gardening ideas is supplied by Western
perceptions. It might be have been more helpful for the reader if the author
had included a chapter that introduced Chinese horticulture and related ideas
during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries against the background of
Chinese horticulture history from the Chinese perspective. Liu might have
also considered mentioning Taoism in his discussion of Chinese garden
ideas and the philosophy of 天人合一 (which is better translated as “oneness
between man and nature”) as well as in the last chapter. It would certainly
have been helpful to introduce Mencius and Xun Zi into the discussions of
human nature in the final chapter too. But, on the whole, following the path
pioneered by A. O. Lovejoy, Liu offers us an interesting study that, like a
symmetrical English garden, radiates Chinese garden ideas into six sectional
plots focusing on major figures. At the same time, each plot breathes on its
own as an independent chapter that illuminates ambiguous discordances and
affinities. I would recommend this book to scholars, as well as to graduate
and even undergraduate college students interested in comparative studies
of landscaping history, culture, literature, philosophy, and art.
Qingyun Wu
California State University, Los Angeles

world literature

Mapping World Literature: International Canonization and Transnational

Literatures. By Mads Rosendahl Thomsen. London: Continuum, 2008.
172 pp. Paper $39.95.

“The mappamund has been changing pattern,” a speaker declares in

Finnegans Wake, “since time and races were.” Nowhere have the changing
times required more extensive redrawing of maps than in world literature

comparative literature studies, vol. 47, no. 3, 2010.

Copyright © 2010 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA.

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 BOOK REVIEWS 397

studies, as scholars seek ways to chart the exponentially larger literary field
now under consideration. Mads Rosendahl Thomsen’s Mapping World Lit-
erature is an important contribution to our process of remapping. In four
elegant, economical chapters, Thomsen synthesizes leading theories of the
struggle for international recognition and the processes of global canoniza-
tion, and he proposes a suggestive model of his own for grouping works into
coherent “constellations” for reading, teaching, and analysis.
In a first chapter, “World Literature: History, Concept, Paradigm,”
Thomsen surveys conceptions of world literature from Goethe to the pres-
ent, giving judicious appraisals of the strengths and limitations of a range
of theories. In triangulating among the conceptions he discusses, Thomsen
seeks to draw out a dynamic understanding of the process of canonization
by which works come to be considered part of world literature. In Thomsen’s
view, we need models that allow both for individual genius and for systemic
effects such as center-periphery relations, imbalances of national prestige,
and the gradual, delocalized process by which works may gain canonical
status over time. He emphasizes as well that the literary field is temporally
divided into the established, slowly changing canon of older literatures and
the shifting, uncertain field of contemporary world literature.
Thomsen develops his distinctive approach in his second chapter,
“Shifting Focal Points in the International Canons,” in which he argues
for a more nuanced understanding of canonicity in its spatial and temporal
variety. Temporary “subcenters” of canonical force can develop in a given
nation or region for a limited period of time, as with the sudden promi-
nence of the Russian novel in the age of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky or, to look
across genres, the Weimar of Goethe and Schiller. Thomsen proposes that
such subcenters greatly enrich the limited picture offered by an exclusive
focus on major literary centers such as Paris or New York. He contrasts
the mutual reinforcement of writers within subcenters to the situation of
“lonely canonicals”—individual writers such as Kierkegaard and Borges
who achieve prominence in the absence of any broader national prominence
in the world market, showing the need to find new categories to supple-
ment those of the nation and the international system as a whole. This
is suggestive, though at times Thomsen draws his canonical lines rather
restrictively; Julio Cortázar’s many foreign admirers may be surprised to
learn that Borges is “the only Argentine writer to have gained a lasting
prominent position in world literature” (45). Thomsen makes good use of
Borges’s important essay “The Argentine Writer and Tradition,” yet doesn’t
pause to consider the extent to which, in ironically disengaging himself from
direct representation of his peripheral homeland, Borges may be creating

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 398 COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES

a literary space for himself against other Argentine rivals to national and
international fame alike.
In his third and fourth chapters, Thomsen examines two categories
of writing in a newly transnational mode: the literature of migrant writers
and the literature of Holocaust survivors. Thomsen discusses migrant writ-
ers in terms of Homi Bhabha’s hybridity and the sociological theories of
Pierre Bourdieu and Ulrich Beck; he compares “cosmopolitan regionalism”
and formal innovation in migrant writers from Joyce and Eliot to Milan
Kundera, Gao Xingjian, and Michel Houellebecq. Thomsen’s analyses
fruitfully combine consideration of national cultures, systemic features, and
individual aesthetic strategies in accounting for the success of the migrant
writers he examines. If migrancy involves an entry into a new national space,
Holocaust literature takes migrant internationalism a step further. Members
of a highly self-aware international diaspora, Holocaust writers often are
not writing from a national perspective or even that of a bicultural hybridity.
Their readers, in turn, may read Holocaust literature together with works on
other times and places, such as Armenia in 1915. Such writing constitutes a
distinctive literary constellation of its own, only loosely tied into national
markets or centers of literary prestige.
In his conclusion, Thomsen argues that these kinds of literary constella-
tions provide important groupings that mediate between the national and the
global. More specific generic or thematic constellations can be constructed
as well—for example, a constellation of works centered around a socially
isolated hero with an obsessive private project (Dostoevsky’s Underground
Man, Kafka’s Hunger Artist, Melville’s Bartleby, and Perec’s Bartlebooth).
Such constellations can provide a starting point for cross-cultural analysis,
inflected but not determined by national settings. Discussion of constella-
tions can extend beyond a core of canonical works to encompass neglected
works as well and, ideally, help usher them into eventual prominence in
world literature.
Thomsen’s discussion is informed by his own cultural position. As a
Danish scholar writing in English, he participates both in a national and
an international discourse, as well as in an intermediate regional constel-
lation (he regularly draws on examples from Sweden and Norway as well
as Denmark). He also builds on local critical traditions: he several times
returns to his great Danish predecessor Georg Brandes and prints Brandes’s
important, skeptical essay Weltliteratur (1899) as an appendix. Brandes pub-
lished his essay in the then reigning scholarly language of German, just as
Thomsen presents it now in English; yet Thomsen is able to cast his net

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 BOOK REVIEWS 399

far more widely than Brandes, whose activities were bifurcated between
national and transnational worlds. Though Brandes exerted himself to bring
a cosmopolitan awareness of the wider literary world to his countrymen,
his most influential work, the politically progressive Hauptströmungen der
Literatur des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts, dealt only with France, Germany, and
England. He saw his own literature, apparently, as too much of a tributary
rivulet to be included with the “main streams” of his century’s literature.
Mads Thomsen’s map has room for “major” and “minor” literatures alike
and develops new coordinates that other worldly mapmakers will want to
employ.
David Damrosch
Harvard University

How to Read World Literature. By David Damrosch. West Sussex, UK:

Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. 147 pp. Paper $24.95.

Teaching World Literature. Edited by David Damrosch. New York: Modern

Language Association, 2009. 440 pp. Paper $22.00.

The Longman Anthology of World Literature. 2nd ed. 6 vols. Edited by David
Damrosch and David L. Pike. New York: Pearson Longman, 2009. Paper
$300.00.

In Borges’s story “The Aleph,” the narrator’s account of what he saw at/
in the mysterious Aleph appears to echo the book project of one of the
characters, an undertaking that “covers” entire hectares of the Australian
landscape. If the aleph stands for the totality of literature, then today’s rich
and expanding bibliography of works about that immensity, along with
the increasingly massive anthologies that seek to encircle it, show that we
have lost our fear of the unbounded object that we study. In his Teaching
World Literature, How to Read World Literature, and the six-volume second
edition of the Longman Anthology of World Literature, coedited with David
Pike, David Damrosch has more than created a classroom Australia. He has
produced a pedagogy. The vastness of the debate entered into by Damrosch,
his coeditors and contributors leaves the instructor of literature with many

comparative literature studies, vol. 47, no. 3, 2010.

Copyright © 2010 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA.

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