Weltliteratur in der longue durée. Herausgegeben von Schamma Schahadat und Annette Werberger. Leiden: Brill/Fink, 2021. xxiii + 439 Seiten + 3 s/w und 1 farbige Abbildungen. $90.00 gebunden oder eBook.

There have been numerous studies devoted to the world-literature paradigm since the beginning of the new millennium. Weltliteratur in der longue durée consists of an introduction, fifteen essays, and a concluding interview that seek to further advance our understanding of a concept made famous through the interventions of Goethe in the first half of the 19^th century. The essays are highly eclectic but broadly consistent within each of the volume’s three sections: oral literature; world literature in the context of folklore studies, ethnography, as well as travel literature; and world literature’s institutionalization.

Only one of the essays, Elke Sturm-Trigonakis’s “Neue Weltliteratur: Zeit und Raum,” treats in a cohesive manner the postulate implied by the volume’s title and sometimes proposed by scholars who have tried to constrict somewhat the parameters of which works deserved to be categorized as world literature. She implies that, as the introduction to the volume by the editors puts it, only a “langfristige Präsenz im Kanon” of literary works, a “longue durée” of their critical reception and reading, allows them to be characterized as “Weltliteratur” (xx). This is the case even though Sturm-Trigonakis does not treat canonicity with respect to “new world literature” in a traditional temporal sense, signifying works which stand the test of time, but as existing within the realm of a contemporary globalization. To categorize such works, she uses a term that is used so pervasively in the volume that it is employed in each essay, often several times. This term, Verflechtung, and its variants allow/s these thematically quite disparate engagements to be imbued with a certain cohesion. While this appellation is not terribly common in world-literature studies, all the chapters in this volume are themselves somewhat interconnected by their focus on the often global, or at least transnational, interconnectedness—Verflechtung—of the works and discourses they explore.

Given the large number of essays in the volume, only a cursory summary of each one is possible. Erhard Schüttpelz’s introductory “Drei Schritte zur Weltliteratur” uses the term “Verflechtung” and its variants a number of times in arguing primarily that only works that are intercontinentally interconnected deserve the appellation Weltliteratur. Fritz W. Kramer opens the “Oralliteratur” section by underscoring the performative aspect of such works, a nuance often lost or distorted through their textualization. Michael Harbsmeier also foregrounds the performativity of travel narratives, even in their written form. In some travel narratives, such performativity is ritualized. Rüdiger Zymner’s chapter draws on biopoetics and evolutionary psychology to underscore the world-literary qualities of works that are most commonly treated more as folkloric relics than sophisticated literary art. Gerhard Schlatter’s essay exclusively engages with the oral literature of Aboriginals in Central Australia. Their narratives are marked by a high degree of geographic specificity but also timelessness. The aboriginal societies have declined as these geographic spaces have lost their sacred character.

Christian Moser’s essay on the problematic aspect of the “global literature concept” in Goethe and Herder opens the volume’s second section. Moser underscores the economic metaphoricity of these two figures’ respective world-literary engagements. Both Goethe and Herder saw Germans as the modern mediators of global literature, having taken over this role from the ancient Phoenicians. Mirna Zeman proposes to place the practice of “Labeling” into the service of researching translocal literary interconnectedness (“Verflechtungen,” 137). Annette Werberger offers a fascinating take on how literary movements in Europe, particularly Dadaism, possess a shamanistic character. In such movements, the shaman is seen as a precursor and model for modern poets. Ulrich van Loyen shows how primitivism becomes a core feature in literary engagements with the South of Italy, an ethnologically interesting realm because of the strong traditions there of “Familismus und Klientelismus” (xix), as the editors of the volume put it.

Sturm-Trigonakis’s essay opens the third section with a focus on temporal and spatial borderland literature. She argues that linguistically and culturally hybrid works can be characterized as belonging to a “Neue Weltliteratur.” Marcus Hahn’s chapter has a narrower focus: Gottfried Benn’s instrumentalization of Kurt Beringer’s ethnopharmacological research on, particularly, the peyote culture of indigenous tribes in the American Southwest, a poetic instrumentalization that radically distorts Beringer’s representation of peyote cults. Irene Albers demonstrates how Africa became constituted as a producer of world literature through the efforts of three French-language ethnologists. Their interventions led to a fruitful interconnection between African works and the European avant-garde. Such exchanges, she argues, bring about “Verflechtungsgeschichten” in the sense of a “Weltliteratur als Kommunikation” (262). Schamma Schahadat shows how the Soviet Writers’ Congress of 1934 tried to create a Soviet-style world literature for that empire’s vast multiethnic, multilingual territories by unifying them under the rubric of Socialist Realism. The distortive effect of this literary politics is made evident in the following chapter, Susi K. Frank’s study of multinational Soviet literature. These politics were imperialist in purport because they fell under the sway of nineteenth-century imperialistic influence, as can be seen in the works and reception of two non-ethnically Russian poets in the Soviet Union. The most linguistically and geographically comprehensive essay in the volume is the final one. Gesine Drews-Sylla shows how a Senegalese writer placed Nikolai Gogol’s comedy The Government Inspector (1836) into the 1960s context of early Senegalese independence to create a film which, like Gogol’s play, skewers government corruption. The use of the Wolof language in the film deliberately challenges the nation’s then President Léopold Sédar Senghor’s Francophone orientation in the service of his négritude paradigm. The volume concludes with an interview by Erhard Schüttpelz of Michael Oppitz focused on the latter’s research into shamanistic songs and practices in the Himalayas.

While not always cohesive with respect to thematic focus, Weltliteratur in der longue durée offers many interesting readings of how the world-literature paradigm can be employed to reveal sociocultural Verflechtungen throughout the globe.