The World Republic of Letters

Citation

Casanova, P. (2007). The World Republic of Letters (M. B. DeBevoise, Trans.). Harvard University Press.

Chapter Summary

The book has an introduction, two parts of five and six chapters, and a conclusion. Part I builds a model of "world literary space"; Part II tests it on the careers of writers from dominated literary spaces. Detailed notes follow the main text.

Context and Argument

Casanova, a French critic, argues that literature has its own international order, relatively independent of economics and politics, in which languages, genres and national literatures compete for prestige. Inspired by Fernand Braudel and Pierre Bourdieu, she treats literary value as a kind of capital that accumulates in a few centres, with Paris cast as the capital of that space. Writers from small or marginal languages must gain recognition from these centres, and the book studies the strategies they use to do so. Reviewers have taken it as a major attempt at a systematic theory of world literature, and also as a model that is itself centred on Paris.

Introduction: The Figure in the Carpet

The short introduction presents the project of describing a world of letters that is relatively independent of economic and political realms, rather than treating works one national tradition at a time.

Chapter 1: Principles of a World History of Literature

The chapter sets out the model's vocabulary under headings such as "The Bourse of Literary Values", "Literariness", "Cosmopolitans and Polyglots" and "Paris: City of Literature". A closing section on literature, nation and politics argues against reading literary history only through national foundations and for a new method of interpretation.

Chapter 2: The Invention of Literature

Casanova traces how literary capital first accumulated: the "devouring" of Latin, the battle over French and the cult of the language, the empire of French and the English challenge, and the Herderian revolution, whose "Herder effect" ties literature to the people and the national language.

Chapter 3: World Literary Space

The chapter introduces the "Greenwich meridian of literature", a baseline of literary modernity (with sections on modernity and anachronisms). It then distinguishes literary nationalism, national versus international writers, and forms of literary domination, including literary regions, linguistic areas and the postcolonial novel.

Chapter 4: The Fabric of the Universal

This chapter deals with how works are consecrated: the capital and its double, translation as "littérisation", language games, the importance of being universal, and the ethnocentrism of the centres. It closes with a paired case study, Ibsen in England and in France.

Chapter 5: From Literary Internationalism to Commercial Globalization?

The last chapter of Part I turns to the present; its title poses the question of how the older literary internationalism relates to commercial globalization.

Chapters 6–8: The Small Literatures; The Assimilated; The Rebels

Part II, "Literary Revolts and Revolutions", moves from model to cases. Chapter 6 covers literary destitution, political dependency, national aesthetics, and Beckett, Michaux and Kafka. Chapter 7 examines strategies of assimilation through Naipaul, Michaux, Cioran and Ramuz. Chapter 8 covers the uses of "the people", national tales and legends, the importation of texts, the creation of literary capitals and the "international of small nations".

Chapters 9–10: The Tragedy of Translated Men; The Irish Paradigm

Chapter 9 looks at writers who work between languages (Kafka, the "creators of languages", Mário de Andrade, Swiss writers). Chapter 10 treats the Irish revival as a paradigm, from Yeats, the Gaelic League, Synge, O'Casey and Shaw to Joyce and Beckett, and ends with the genesis and structure of a literary space.

Chapter 11 and Conclusion: The Revolutionaries; The World and the Literary Trousers

Chapter 11 follows the "Joycean family" and the "Faulknerian revolution", including Faulkner's reception in Spain, Algeria and Latin America, and turns to the invention of literary languages. The conclusion, "The World and the Literary Trousers", draws the argument together.

Key Concepts

Part I: The Literary World (Chapters 1–5)

• Literary capital: prestige accumulated by a language or national literature, which gives its writers and institutions the power to consecrate others.
• World literary space: the international field in which literatures compete, with its own hierarchy, capitals and peripheries.
• Greenwich meridian of literature: the measure of literary modernity against which works from other places are judged as new or belated.
• Littérisation: the process by which translation turns a work from a dominated language into recognized literature.

Part II: Literary Revolts and Revolutions (Chapters 6–11)

• Small literatures: literatures of dominated or newly formed linguistic spaces whose writers are in "literary destitution".
• Assimilation, rebellion, revolution: the chapter titles name the broad strategies open to writers far from the centres.
• Translated men: writers whose careers depend on moving between languages and on being translated.

Critical Analysis

Strengths

• A single model across centuries. The first four chapters give one set of concepts (value, capital, centre, periphery, consecration) and test it on a history running from Latin through French to the German and English challenges.
• Case studies that carry the argument. Part II uses named writers (Kafka, Joyce, Beckett, Faulkner, Naipaul, Yeats, Andrade) and a paired example (Ibsen in England and France) to show strategies concretely.
• Critical reception. Terry Eagleton, in the New Statesman, placed the book in the lineage of Auerbach, Lukács and Frye and praised its lucidity; Louis Menand, in The New Yorker, called it "rather brilliant" and agreed that departments organized by language and nation hide how literature works.

Limitations

• A Paris-centred picture. The model makes Paris the capital of world literature; Eagleton noted that the case for the literary underdog is made from that citadel of high culture. Readers from other traditions will want to test how far the model travels.
• Reuse of earlier work. Martin Harries, reviewing in Modernism/Modernity, showed that many passages are nearly identical to Casanova's earlier book on Beckett, which suggests how central Beckett is to the whole design.
• Heavy conceptual apparatus. Specialist vocabulary and a long chain of case studies in Part II reward readers who already know the writers discussed.

Where It Fits in the Course

Within the world and comparative literature list, this is the book that proposes a theory of the system. Ben Hutchinson's short introduction and Domínguez, Saussy and Villanueva's guide to the discipline are better first stops for the field's history and methods. David Damrosch's What Is World Literature? is the nearest rival account, treating world literature as a mode of circulation and reading rather than as a competitive field; reading the two together shows the main disagreement in the debate. Auerbach's Mimesis is a model of close reading by comparison, and the Norton anthology supplies the primary texts that Casanova's argument is about.

How to Use This Book

The book suits advanced undergraduates, graduate students and readers who already have a course in comparative or world literature and some familiarity with modern European and postcolonial writers.

• Core: the introduction and Part I, especially Chapters 1 and 3, which set out the vocabulary, plus the conclusion.
• Case studies: read the Part II chapters that match writers you know (Chapter 7 for Naipaul, Michaux, Cioran and Ramuz; Chapter 10 for Ireland; Chapter 11 for Joyce and Faulkner) and skim the rest.
• Alongside: pair Chapter 2 with a history of the French and German literary traditions, and keep a list of Casanova's terms to apply to a literature you know well; the exercise shows where the model fits and where it strains.