World-Systems Analysis, Evolutionary Theory, Weltliteratur

Abstract

friend brought me the first volume of The Modern World-System, I: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European WorldEconomy in the Sixteenth Century ( Wallers tein, 1974) from the United States in the late 1970's; the book made an enormous impression on me, and I remember wondering how it could affect, and change, the study of literature. But I found an answer only several years later, when I realized that world-systems analysis offered a very good way to account for the mix of all-inclusiveness and chaos which had often been noticed in Modernist texts (Ulysses, The Waste Land, Cantos . . .), but never truly explained. In the light of world-systems analysis, this strange combination could be recognized as an attempt to represent a world which had simultaneously become one (whence the all-inclusiveness), but full of disparities and contradictions (whence the chaos). World texts, I called these works, and in a book called The Modern Epic: The World-System from Goethe to Garcia Marquez (1996) (the epic is the literary genre of totality), I traced their lineage forwards in time from the 1920's to magic realism, and backwards, through Wagner and Melville and others, to Goethe's Faust, which was composed between 1770 and 1830, during one of the great expansions of the capitalist world-system. The first contribution of world-systems analysis to literary history, then, was this: it allowed us to see a new literary genreand not just any genre, but the one trying to represent the world as a totality: a possibility that our discipline had never even envisioned, because it lacked the concepts to do so. (When I presented my thesis at Harvard, around 1990, the organizers turned the title of my talk into Word texts, without the 1, so odd must have seemed the

Topics & Concepts