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European Literature:1 Simply a Higher Degree of Universality?2

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 February 2009

Pascale Casanova
Pascale Casanova
Affiliation:
CRAL-EFISAL, 10, rueMonsieur le Prince, F-75006 Paris, France. E-mail: casanova.pascale@wanadoo.fr
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Abstract

One of the most difficult and uncertain areas of research offered the historian of literature today is the attempt to define ‘European literature’ as a corpus and an object of literary and/or historical analysis. The various efforts of the past few years – in the form of anthologies as well as histories of literature – usually remain torn between a unitary presupposition that seems to be the only acceptable political-historical way of justifying the body of European literature and an irreducibly composite – not to say heterogeneous – reality that is not amenable to the representations of Europe as reduced to this superficial unity. If we are to reflect on the modalities and specificities of such a historical undertaking – which has so few equivalents in the world that it is all the harder to model – and shake off political models and representations, it seems to me that we need to work from another hypothesis. One of the few trans-historical features that constitutes Europe, in effect, one of the only forms of both political and cultural unity – one that is paradoxical but genuine – that makes of Europe a coherent whole, is none other than the conflicts3 and competitions that pitted Europe’s national literary spaces against one another in relentless and ongoing rivalry. Starting from this hypothesis, we would then have to postulate that, contrary to commonly accepted political representations, the only possible literary history of Europe would be the story of the rivalries, struggles and power relations between these national literatures. As a consequence, rather than a unity that remains if not problematic at least far from being achieved, it would no doubt be better to speak of an ongoing literary unification of Europe, in other words a process that occurs, occurred and is still occurring – paradoxically – through these struggles. This upside-down history would trace the models and counter-models, the powers and dependences, the impositions and the resistances, the linguistic rivalries, the literary devices and genres regarded as weapons in these specific, perpetual and merciless struggles. It would be the history of literary antagonisms, battles and revolts.

Type
Focus: European Literature
Information
European Review , Volume 17 , Issue 1 , February 2009 , pp. 121 - 132
Copyright
Copyright © Academia Europaea 2009

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References

Notes and References

1. The present essay, as do the other essays making up the ‘Focus’ on ‘Literature for Europe,’ all result from a European Science Foundation-Linnköping University Conference held in Vadstena, Sweden, in May 2007, and sponsored also by the Academia Europaea.Google Scholar
2. I am merely sketching a few trails of reflection for developing a transnational literary history. ‘Life-size’ studies on these subjects would obviously require much more detailed, collective and transnational research. As I worked alone I have often taken a Franco-centric view in this article; I am fully aware of this.Google Scholar
3. See among others Tilly, C. (1995) European Revolutions, 1492–1992 (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers). E. Terray (1993) ‘Le Conflit’: L’Expérience européenne de la guerre, L’Esprit de l’Europe, vol. 2 (Paris: Flammarion), pp. 244–267.Google Scholar
4. I hope the organizers will forgive me for these few preliminary considerations, which describe a state of the discussion about European literature and by no means question the terms of the invitation to the symposium.Google Scholar
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22. In this symbolic domain par excellence, the use of economic vocabulary – heritage, wealth or treasures – is inevitable and emphasizes the fact that we are indeed talking about the accumulation of a capital.Google Scholar
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