The purpose of this paper is to examine the influence of globalization on English literature with special reference to Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha. Globalization has changed the face of English ...literature, when we think of globalization and forms of entertainment, we immediately think of the internet, social media, movies, or television shows. But contrary to popular belief, literature also holds an important place in the flow of entertainment media that is coursing through the veins of public consumption in our globalized world. The technological advances that are connecting people worldwide through shared information are also serving as a medium to disseminate books across national and cultural boundaries. The term "world literature" was first used by the German writer and statesman Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, referring to dissemination of literature from and to countries across the globe. World literature, in the modern sense, refers to literary works that are translated into multiple languages and circulated to an audience outside their country origin. Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha was published in Germany in 1922; it quickly became popular throughout Europe. Its introspective and passive protagonist appealed to readers who were traumatized by the violence of aggression of World War I, which had ended few years before its publication. It became popular again after World War II, when Hesse won many prestigious awards, including the Nobel Prize in literature in 1946. A few decades later, American readers' supportive pacifism and individualistic spirituality found resonance in Siddhartha, which was first published in English in 1951. Hesse's Siddhartha has transcended the boundaries of nation, language and culture. Keywords: Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha, Globalization, World Literature, Cultural Boundaries, English Literature
Writing Trauma Li, Yongli
Chinese literature today,
20/1/2/, Letnik:
9, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
In this interview, Berry talks about his journeys in the field of Chinese studies, from his initial encounter with Chinese language and translation, to his scholarly work on "trauma" and "global ...China." Along the way, he discusses the challenges that he has faced as a translator and the evolving culture of translation of Chinese literature in the world. He also shares his views and experiences on oral history projects with filmmakers and writers, especially focusing on his most recent in-depth interviews with Hou Hsiao-hsien and Jia Zhangke.
David Foster Wallace's Germany Thompson, Lucas
Comparative literature studies (Urbana),
01/2019, Letnik:
56, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
This article draws on numerous archival findings together with close comparative analyses to account for a number of German philosophical and literary intertexts that have hitherto gone unnoticed by ...Wallace scholars. It shows how the work of numerous German writers—including Georg Buchner, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Peter Weiss, Siegfried Kracauer, Max Nordau, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Herman Hesse, among others—influenced Wallace's fiction, as well as exploring Wallace's fraught relationship to German language and culture more broadly. Ultimately, the essay uses such intertextual connections to bring Wallace's work into dialogue with a radically expanded set of literary and intellectual traditions.
Hermann Hesse drafted in 1927 an outline of world literature in his article
Eine Bibliothek der Weltliteratur
(
A Library of World Literature
) in which he took Chinese literature as one of the ...important sources. In 1935, from German translation of historical novel
Water Margins
(
水浒传
) Hesse gave a response to Goethe’s ideal of world literature and defined it as the last common spirit “through empathetic translation, to broaden and enrich one’s own language and literature”. Chinese literature playing this landmark role in Hesse’s world literature is not groundless, but closely related with his continuous reading, commenting on a variety of Chinese literature for 30 years in his early career. He praised the perfect form of Chinese poetry, and ascribed Chinese drama to a treasure of stage art. He argued Chinese short narration with the magic to transform freely and broke through reality and illusion. Hesse also evaluated three Chinese romantic fictions
The Fortunate Union
(
好逑传
),
The Wonder of the Second
-
Plum
(
二度梅
) and
The Plum in the Golden Vase
(
金瓶梅).
He commented twice on the masterpiece
Dream
of
the
Red
Chamber
(
红楼梦
), initially criticized it was not a classic because it embodied no Chinese wisdom, only afterwards reaffirmed that it was a masterpiece depicting “a mood of decline and fatigue”. Hesse’s critique on Chinese classical literature not only provides a vision of literary communication between the East and the West, it is also closely related with his cultivation of world literature, which greatly enriches the construction of “world literature” in the early twentieth century.
Mani shows how every era of German cultural history since Goethe has deployed some version of the concept of “world literature”: from the Orientalist project of making German libraries into centers ...for the study of “Eastern” literary traditions during the colonial era to the Nazi era’s promotion of folk traditions proper to allied peoples and to German speakers in soon-to-be annexed lands; from the socialist-centered world literature of the DDR to the problematic relationship between German “migration literature” and global Anglophone literature in contemporary German intellectual life. ...world literature is not only about what those of us in the academy study or teach, and Mani’s attentiveness to the circulation of literature in manuscript, book, periodical, and digital formats provides valuable insights into the works of literature actually available to common readers in various historical moments, and into how the selection of those works was conditioned in part by the political forces acting on the German culture of the time. ...some of the richest moments in the book come when Mani dissects the arguments of leading manifestos of world literature in the German context, from the inevitable discussion of the Goethe-Eckermann nexus (here extended with an intriguing exploration of Eckerman’s rather tragic later years) through Hermann Hesse’s essay “Eine Bibliothek der Weltliteratur,” published in book form by Reclam in 1929.
By examining "popular texts such as travel narratives as well as so-called high literature and Freud's psychoanalytic works," he writes, "I aim to show how these three types of writing expressed a ...related anxiety and how, in the age of the apparent end of alterity, they pointed toward a new source of modern violence: not in the oft-cited fear of difference, but in the dread of uncanny recognition" (pp. 12–13). Understanding this move at the end of the book as the actual occasion of its beginning, that is, as the cause of its interrogation into the end of alterity and not, as narrative convention of the ends of books would have it, as the effect of its interrogation of that end documented in the body of the book, is important to its argument that alterity is always already within. "An apparent enemy of the state who is frightening precisely because of his similarity to 'us,'" he writes, explaining this position, "might not look like a traditional European, but he does resemble millions of other citizens in today's multicultural West, rendering him, like the nineteenth-century assimilated Jew, non-'obvious': capable of invisibly 'infiltrating' all 'sectors of society and political life'" (p. 180). Since Freud's vision is particularly European, however, the psyche's universal face is part of what, in A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (1999), Spivak calls the West's masquerade: its (auto) biography presented as universal.
ABSTRACT
This article examines the relationship between, and the importance of, myth and utopia in Hermann Hesse's work, their development over several decades, and their significance for our ...understanding of the utopian. The question whether Hesse's work tends more towards the mythological or the utopian has hitherto not been convincingly answered. I demonstrate that Hesse's work initially oscillates between (Promethean) myth and utopia. This becomes very clear in Narziß und Goldmund, where the author engages with the problem of death. In Das Glasperlenspiel, however, Hesse uses myth to create a utopian moment. I argue that Hesse's persistent search for the culmination point of human existence does not necessarily lead to transcendence, but rather makes possible a concrete utopia. According to Hesse, man is capable of reaching a new level of consciousness. His ‘theory of stages’ found itself on the sidelines in a time of collective ideologies but may become relevant in the context of a developing ‘global consciousness’ of autonomous individuals.
Dieser Artikel untersucht, wie sich in Hermann Hesses Werk der Mythos zur Utopie verhält, welche Entwicklung dieses Verhältnis in seinem langen Leben durchgemacht hat, und welche Bedeutung diese Entwicklungslinie für unser Utopieverständnis hat. Die Frage, ob Hesses Denken eher mythologisch oder utopisch orientiert ist, ist bisher nicht überzeugend beantwortet worden. Ich zeige in diesem Artikel, dass Hesses Werk zunächst zwischen Mythologie (besonders dem Prometheus‐Mythos) und Utopie oszilliert. Dies wird besonders deutlich in Narziß und Goldmund, wo der Autor sich mit dem Problem des Todes auseinandersetzt. Mit dem Glasperlenspiel jedoch benutzt Hesse den Mythos, um einen utopischen Moment zu erzeugen. Ich argumentiere, dass Hesses beharrliche Suche nach dem Endpunkt des Seins ihn nicht notwendigerweise im Transzendenten landen lässt, sondern eine konkrete Utopie möglich macht. Nach Hesse kann der Mensch eine neue Bewusstseinsstufe erreichen. Diese auf das Individuum zugeschnittene ‘Stufenlehre’ hatte im Kontext der großen kollektiven Ideologien einen schweren Stand, könnte aber angesichts des sich abzeichnenden ‘globalen Bewusstseins autonomer Individuen relevant werden.
