Impressions

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Moretti’s “Conjectures on World Literature” is the first of his interventions discussing world literature as “literature of the capitalist world-system,” and so necessarily, like that system, “one, yet unequal.” Moretti elaborates:

the world-system school of economic history, for which international capitalism is a system that is simultaneously one, and unequal: with a core, and a periphery (and a semiperiphery) that are bound together in a relationship of growing inequality. One, and unequal: one literature (Weltliteratur, singular, as in Goethe and Marx), or perhaps, better, one world literary system (of inter-related literatures); but a system which is different from what Goethe and Marx had hoped for, because it’s profoundly unequal. (56-7)

For her part, in La République mondiale des lettres, first published by Les Éditions du Seuil in 1999, Casanova insists that the world’s national literatures have been defined by the hierarchized and iniquitous cultural field in which they circulate. She argues that there is a fundamental connection between liberal capitalism and the literature we tend most to esteem, since the literature that is celebrated by the industry is the work that believes in and strives for a version of aesthetic autonomy compatible with bourgeois liberalism: committed to formal perfection and to the freedom of the writer to do as she pleases. Sharae Deckard suggests that work by Moretti and Casanova, along with the materialist studies in world literature by scholars affiliated with the Warwick Research Collective, might be designated “world-literary criticism,” and she applauds it for recognizing how “literature mediates the structural divisions of the world-system.” In her own work Deckard articulates this world-literary criticism to world-ecological criticism, “drawing together a theory of combined and uneven development, with an understanding of the differentiation of the world-system into cores and peripheries, and a conceptualization of capitalism as a world-ecology constituted by ecological regimes” (1-2).

I suggest we might also articulate such a world-literary criticism to a barely existing political economy of literary production, which would consider how labour, property and ownership work within the literary system, and how they impinge upon the writing that exists. It would discuss how people come to make a living working within the literary book industries and how people come to be able to enjoy what those industries produce. It would, for instance, chart how people begin to find it possible to perceive themselves as capable of becoming authors, how their work is made visible to the right people in the industry, how manuscripts are acquired and transformed into final products, how contracts (including foreign rights and translation stipulations) are negotiated, and how a work is put in a position to be noticed by the educators who assign it to students and to the prizing bodies that bring works into the limelight.

These are matters that publishing and print culture studies have been charting in a very limited and particular way. Since the early 1980s, when book history was inaugurated mainly as a Eurocentric and neutral discipline of empirical research, the studies that do exist have tended not to have an avowed position on the fact that the majority of the world’s people are excluded from the practices in question, nor have they connected that exclusion to capitalism. In fact a broad survey of book historical research would give one the impression that the story of the last two hundred years is the story of the gradual and welcome democratization of access to literary experiences and opportunities. There are exceptions to this rule, including a number of studies arising from or paralleling the political economy of communication in the 1970s and 1980s, which are concerned with the iniquitous distribution of the resources necessary for participating in what was purported to be an increasingly global industry, and inspired and supported by international intergovernmental attempts to establish a New World Information and Communication Order. Philip Altbach, for instance, has written and assembled countless works on the neo-colonial drive of the academic system and book marketplace. But these studies, from his early work on “literary colonialism” in the developing world to his more recent studies of unequal “distribution of knowledge” within the academic system, have been almost entirely ignored by literature scholars and book historians (see Altbach, “Literary Colonialism”).

The self-styled “new sociology of literature” has also led to some work in this area. Scholars affiliated with the new sociology of literature have presented their work as an alternative to the earlier 1970s and 1980s sociology of literature, practiced by Raymond Williams, Pierre Bourdieu, Terry Eagleton, and Janet Wolff, among others, which they position as having been committed to “dichotomized and homogeneous poles of ‘literature’ and ‘society’” (Frow 237) and as having “sought to explain transformations in literary forms in terms of the external forces that had acted on them” (Bennett 255). Premier amongst the rejected binary models is the Marxist one positing an economic base that determines the cultural superstructure. What recent scholarship in this field claims to envision instead is a set of interlocking and overlapping spheres (cultural, economic, social, legal, and political), each of which mediates (informs, influences, and shapes) the other. Literature is, thus, like any other cultural process, a set of “phenomena” that “operate in and across different kinds of publicly instituted sociomaterial assemblages” (Bennett 259). I propose instead that we return to the earlier models of literary sociology precisely because they emphasize political economy and the determining force of capitalism.

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What points might a contemporary sociology of world literary production make? To begin with, it can be noted that where the commercial dynamics of contemporary literary culture are concerned, the division of labour within the literary book industries is highly significant. The fact that people directly involved in literary publishing generally do not make a lot of money does not mean that their work is materially insignificant. Even though sales may be modest relative to other kinds of cultural commodities, publishers’ imprints that successfully market world literature titles make valuable contributions to the publisher’s brand equity and to the brand equity of the transnational media company or conglomerate that houses the publisher. This literature’s association with global sophistication and cosmopolitan taste is important to those parents companies that are eager to justify market expansion, and eager also to establish a global division of labour in which aspects of the production chain, such as copyediting and cover design, are outsourced to cheaply staffed “processing zones.” The fact that these companies have literary holdings associated with globally humanistic values for diversity and difference is precisely what eases their expansive drive.

Caroline Davis has shown, for instance, that Oxford University Press (OUP) accrues cultural capital by highlighting the non-commercial status of brands like Clarendon Press and Oxford University itself, and by publishing academic titles selected for academic markets located in the West. Yet in the decades following decolonization it was the economic capital that was gained through extensive sales of educational material in the African market that bankrolled those ostensibly non-commercial ventures. The sheer distance between an African branch office in Ibadan or Accra and the site of the Clarendon Press made it possible for the academic arm to pretend that it was insulated from the commercial enterprise that in fact funded its publishing programme. In volatile markets—affected for instance by the oil and economic crises of the early 1970s, by the Nigerian civil war over Biafra, or by a rising tide of anti-apartheid sentiment and attendant boycotts—the prestige of Oxford could help to justify the publisher’s continued attempts to secure contracts with Africa’s state educators. These included controllers of the contentious Bantu education system which OUP continued to court, despite the fact that several of its own titles were highly critical of the racist and intentionally limited education it afforded.

A second point to make about the sociology of world literary production—and a point that the broad narrative of world literature’s incorporation does make in certain ways—is that class is a crucial restriction on access to literary experiences. It is not only the case that world literature exists for a small roster of readers but that all literature exists for a small roster of readers. As Fisk wryly indicates: “By all of its definitions, world literature is about as bound up with the economic conditions as other cultural phenomena—which is to say, completely.” I would add that perhaps more than ever there is now what Wendy Griswold has called “a reading class” made up of “habitual readers of print with a distinct demographic profile” (1). In Griswold’s portrait, reading as a habitual activity even for working-class people was in fact something of an exception to the general rule in which only a distinct social elite read for anything other than basic information. The culture of literary reading is in fact in decline; the reading class is shrinking and closing ranks.

 

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One Response to “Impressions”

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  1. ken harrow says:

    interesting topic

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