Planetary Literary History: The Place of the Text

Franco moretti has recently dramatized difficult relation between literary history and reading at present moment, in process renewing all of our justified anxieties about exactly what can say about literature. Although Goethe called for advent of the age of world in 1827 and Marx and Engels saw a world literature arising many national and local in 1848, an ever-growing awareness of planetary interconnections in political, economic, and ethical life has lent urgency to project of thinking in terms of a planetary system of literature.1 To register enormity of this task for readers who would be its foot soldiers, Moretti observes, we are talking of hundreds of languages and literatures here. Reading 'more' seems hardly to be solution. Especially because we've just started rediscovering what Margaret Cohen calls 'great unread.'2 So much to read, so little time. Moretti thus holds out before us a proj ect whose immensity impresses us with comparative triviality of our own individual efforts. A task that might be characterized as Herculean and sublime, genuinely planetary literary history would disrupt understanding of reading-as-self-cultivation or reading-as-the-mastery of-national-literatures (packaged in relatively manageable form of canons). It would look completely unlike noble calling that Matthew Arnold took reading to be when he urged readers to judge so intensely and repeatedly that they might overcome their chauvinisms and paro chialisms, might advance a justification of a national literary academy on model of French Academy. For Moretti, even a lifetime of reading cannot come to terms with a project of such scale. The very perception of planetary literature as a whole that dwarfs individual capacities marks it as sublime and suggests next stage in his argument?the shift into another mode. Moretti de scribes what would be a subreption in Kant's terms?a consciousness of our own capacity to think such overwhelming of our individual empirical capacities. In Moretti's terms, however, this shift from unmanageable and intolerable overabundance to a new and manageable phase occurs less as an account of consciousness than as a methodological response?an