Goethe as World Literature

Erlin, Matt; Erlin, Matt

Virtually every reflection on the history of the concept of world literature includes a reference to Goethe’s Conversations with Eckermann (1836). These discussions, however, tend to pay less attention to the transnational histories of Goethe’s own works and to how situating them in their global contexts might enhance our understanding of what world literature is or can be. This panel seeks to open up new perspectives on the world literature debate by focusing on Goethe’s works as world literature, whether the concept is understood in the author’s original sense, or as “a mode of circulation and reading” (Damrosch), a marker of prestige for texts that receive consecration in the “world republic of letters” (Casanova), a utopian space of cross-cultural exchange and understanding (Ngũgĩ) or a label best suited to describe such new international genres as “the dull global novel” (Parks). The three papers address this question at three different levels of focalization: the close reading of a single work by the Indian poet and novelist Janice Pariat, an investigation of a series of adaptations and popularizations of Goethe’s Werther in contemporary Japan, and a distant reading of a large corpus of Goethe epigraphs in nineteenth-century European novels. Taken together, they not only open up new and innovative perspectives on the global afterlives of Goethe’s publications; each is also anchored in a set of reflections on how reading Goethe in this context can further develop our grasp of world literature as an analytical and ethical category.

Goethe’s Metamorphosis of Plants in the Global South: Ecological and Insurgent Worldmaking in Janice Pariat’s Everything the Light Touches

This paper examines how Janice Pariat’s Everything the Light Touches (HarperCollins, 2022) reimagines Goethe’s Metamorphosis of Plants through an Indigenous and anti-colonial lens, embedding Goethe’s thought within contemporary ecological and political struggles in India’s Northeastern region. By foregrounding regional histories and Indigenous epistemologies often marginalized within broader literary canons, Pariat’s novel juxtaposes Goethe’s botanical inquiries with the resistance of the Khasi people—a community politically and culturally marginalized both under British colonial rule and by the Indian state, which classifies them as a “Scheduled Tribe” under the Indian Constitution. Pariat reframes Weltliteratur not as a Eurocentric ideal but as a contested space where literature mediates environmental and insurgent world-making, resisting prestige-driven models of world literature (Casanova) and advancing a more ethical, relational framework (à la Ngũgĩ and Pheng Cheah) that centers local histories within global literary debates.

Neo Werther: Adaptation and Popularization in Contemporary Japan

Japan’s prolific and imaginative pop culture continues to generate Wertheriads, an international genre that flourished when Goethe’s scandalous book was followed not only by countless domestic productions but also by a good number of French and English novels. Since the initial burst of imitators only a few significant works have expanded the pool of deliberate Wertheriads, notably Ludwig Jacobowski’s 1892 novel Werther the Jew and Ulrich Plenzdorf’s 1973 The New Sorrows of Young W. It may therefore come as a surprise to learn that Japanese authors have produced a number of popular Wertheriads in recent decades, from Kaji Tatsuo’s 1983 crime novel The Mysterious Death of Young Werther to Nishio Ishin’s 2023 near-future novel Rest in Peace in Werther Town. This paper shows how these texts re-frame and popularize Goethe as world literature, highlighting the significance of transformation and cross-cultural exchange for our understanding of world literature as an analytical framework. The paper also shows how these adaptations draw momentum from the widely disseminated sociological concept of the Werther effect, and, finally, explain why chocolate and coffee constitute an important part of the mix that keeps Werther in Japan very much alive.

Worlding Goethe through Epigraphs

This paper will analyze the ways in which the extensive use of epigraphs quoting Goethe during the nineteenth century can reveal complex networks of influence, circulation and translation across Europe. The first part of this paper will be concerned with a mapping of Goethe’s epigraphs in the nineteenth-century European novel by applying network analysis tools to large literary corpora. This distant reading perspective will be complemented by a close reading of the striking use of Goethe epigraphs in Rosalía de Castro’s La hija del mar (1859 and in Ossian, in turn, through Goethe’s own translation as performed by Werther. These striking epigraphs reveal the potential for misattribution, pseudotranslation and relay translation across several languages as prismatic modes of circulation of both Goethe as world literature and of world literature through Goethe.

57 Goethe as World Literature: Calls for Papers