Mundus Totus Exilium Est: Reflections on the Critic in Exile

Abstract

Comparative literature has always presupposed transnationality, not only as it may be encountered in the circulations of texts and ideas, but also as it appears in the vocation of the critic. The critic engaged in a comparative study of literature, like Walter Benjamin’s translator, is positioned outside of the national, linguistic, or cultural forest, desperately trying to catch echoes of the foreign utterances with more or less familiar resonances.¹ “National literature,” as Goethe put it in the early nineteenth century, “is no longer of any importance; it is time for world literature, and all must aid in bringing it about.”² In this view of Weltliteratur, a certain unfamiliarity or lack of homeliness is required. To forego the national in favor of some international or transnational vision is to embrace alterity, the estrangement that comes with being “out of place,” which is also one of the most powerful experiences of the literary itself, as the great Russian formalists reminded us. To engage in the theory and practice of comparative literature is to confront this estrangement head on, not in order to make the transnational more familiar, but to marvel and delight in its implacable weirdness. In this sense, the critic approaches all texts as foreign, and criticism, rather than domesticating the strange experiences of the text, serves to evoke and even celebrate its foreignness.