David Damrosch, what is world literature 281-303 - Essay Example

While it takes years to know a person personality or understand a specific culture, it takes less time to know these things through a literature piece. Literature distills humanity into words, words that can allow us to understand people’s cultures and values in a way that can never be achieved through physical interactions. Writers have long attempted to define and understand the works of other writers coming from different cultures. However, writers often find it difficult to extract the literal meaning behind different literally works due to factors such as, language barriers and lack of knowledge on the cultural background that a specific literature piece came from.

In his conclusion, David Damrosch discussed a wide variety of genres, from epic poetry to fiction novels and explained how these forms have been viewed in different eras and cultures. In his opinion, Damrosch believes that world literature consists of national literatures, writings that gains in translation and is a form of detached engagement with words that are beyond our own place and time (1). Works of literature are often grouped by place of origin, language, and genre. In his conclusion of the world literature, Damrosch explains how all literary works are often born within the person’s culture or home country.

After all, literature is an expression of a given society’s culture, ideals and collective soul and consciousness. These written words as conveyed in literature convey these collective soul and consciousness in a manner as what Damrosch has written, “could never be understood by physical interactions”. With each culture and society expressing itself distinct of its own cultural heritage, we form a body of world literature which scholars like Damroch seeks to interpret either as an elliptical refraction of national literatures, a writing that gains in translation or a form of detached engagement with worlds beyond our own place and time.

Through these various interpretations, I am more inclined to subscribe to the idea that literature is our form of our detached engagement with worlds beyond our own place and time. It is because through literature, we are able to see a world beyond ours though we may not always understand it because we tend to read and interpret literature through the lens of our own cultural context. Nevertheless, our horizon expands and our world became bigger by merely reading world literature and in the process foster understanding with all the inhabitants of this planet.

Reflecting on this, I am hesitant to align myself to Rene Wellek’s interpretation in the reading that literature is merely an elliptical refraction and that the circulation of world literature is a merely “the foreign trade of literature” (284). I believe that world literature is more than that.If I am to interpret world literature, it would not be the attempt to highlight our differences as what Damrosch has interpreted it to be an elliptical refraction of national literatures. Rather, I would like to believe it as more of our detached engagement to express ourselves and in expressing ourselves, we found that we are more alike than different despite varying cultures because more often than not, the topics discussed in world literature such as beauty, love, hope, anger, hatred and any other human emotion and expression is universal to all humankind.