The era of increasing globalization encouraged the growth of theories of world literature and transnational relationships, suggesting that national literary traditions are being superseded by hybrid and cross-cultural forms that allow us to see beyond the horizons of national belonging. Yet, both the retreat to the homeland during the pandemic and the formation and development of the Ukrainian nation in the conflict with Russia suggest that the nation has remained the key category of cultural belonging and political will formation. Though migration and cross-cultural interaction have transformed our relationship to the world, these globe-spanning movements do not necessarily lead to the dissolution of national traditions. Rather, they may even be the catalysts for establishing the primacy of such traditions for collective identity in the modern world. This special session will investigate the ways in which national traditions develop out of transnational contexts.

David Pan analyzes the beginnings of German national consciousness in the reflections on language in the work of Johann Gottfried Herder and Johann Gottlieb Fichte. Both writers consider German culture and language within a multicultural context in which different linguistic and literary traditions confront each other. While Herder is known for focusing on the diversity of national traditions in order to move away from a universal philosophical framework, Fichte compares the French and German languages in order to establish a universal conception of linguistic development. For both writers, the engagement with linguistic and cultural diversity forms the context for a focus on a national tradition. Herder’s affirmation of the nation as the product of historical contingency leads him to treat each tradition as a unique and valuable expression of human development. Meanwhile, Fichte’s universal philosophical account of culture discounts the importance of historical contingency, leading him to insist on the natural superiority of the German over the French language. While both writers develop their notions of the national tradition through the engagement with alternative traditions, Fichte’s universalist rather than traditionalist conception of culture leads to the more chauvinistic idea of the nation.

Sijia Yao shows how a comparative method can illuminate the way in which the integrity of different national traditions provides the context within which individual works gain meaning. Both D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers and Eileen Chang’s “Heart Sutra” depict parent-child incestuous love. While critics have tried to understand both narratives as illustrations of a Freudian Oedipal dynamic that was familiar to both writers, Yao shows that the incestuous love in the stories can only be properly understood within the context of each work’s national tradition. Rather than being the expression of a universal Oedipal dynamic, incestuous love results from the way in which the weakening of the incest prohibition happens differently in the two stories. “Heart Sutra” reacts to the tradition of filial piety in Chinese literature while Sons and Lovers maintains its focus on the well-being of the children. The comparison highlights the differences in the two national traditions that determine the possibilities available to the figures in each of the stories. The comparison method does not release the works from their context but rather illuminates how the specific constraints of each national tradition shape the structure of each narrative.

Russell Berman examines transformations in the construction of nationhood with regard to the question of political exile and the rhetoric of Communist internationalism in the lyric work of Syrian poet Adel Karasholi. Nationhood is poised between nostalgia (for the lost homeland) and the engagement for social transformation. Fleeing persecution in Damascus, Karasholi found refuge in Germany, and in the context of the Cold War, chose to settle in East Germany in 1960, where he produced an oeuvre both in Arabic and in German. His writings testify to the durability of the nation as a cultural reference point as well as to the tensions inherent in the construction of the national identity: Kurdish or Syrian, Syrian or Arab nationalism, East German versus West German. Through his engagement with the categories of Marxist aesthetics, especially Brechtian theory, the status of nation becomes further problematic as a competitor to class. Karasholi's work allows for an examination of the persistence of nation as a poetic category despite the heterogeneous forces working against it: exile, left internationalism, German anti-nationalism. In this framework, his translations of Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish are of particular significance.

The papers in this session investigate the interaction between traditions in order to understand how the nation remains the fundamental context for literature in the modern world.