This volume is dedicated to the work and legacies of French literary critic Pascale Casanova, who passed away on September 29, 2018, at the age of 59. Exploring the issues of literary autonomy and the revolutionary force of the periphery, but also the inequalities between languages and cultures, her work has been deeply influential in literary studies and beyond. Her seminal book The World Republic of Letters (Harvard UP 2004) is foundational for world literature studies, together with Franco Morettiâs essays âConjectures on World Literatureâ (2000) and âMore Conjecturesâ (2003), and David Damroschâs What is World Literature? (2003). In this introduction, we begin by outlining Casanovaâs atypical trajectory; we then turn to the major theoretical and practical issues her work puts forth, as well as her intellectual engagement; and finally, we look at the legacies of her works as illustrated by each of the contributions included in this volume.1
1 The Atypical Trajectory of a Literary Critic
Before dedicating herself entirely to research, Pascale Casanova was one of the most important French literary critics active in the media. After studying modern literature and philosophy at Tours where she was born, she worked as a producer for the radio station France-Culture. In her programs âLes Jeudis littéraires,â followed by âLes mardis littérairesâ and then âlâAtelier littéraire,â she introduced the most innovative French and foreign authors, with her beautiful deep voice that still resonates in the memory of her audience, punctuated by her pearled laughter. But she sadly lost this voice and this laughter soon after she left the radio in 2010, struck by an incurable disease that she courageously fought for a decade, while the invitations she received in the wake of the worldwide reception of The World Republic of Letters piled up.
An independent researcher, Pascale Casanova continued to produce a highly original and inspiring body of research in a genuinely disinterested manner and in the isolation that was forced on her by the disease. Indeed, despite the international recognition of her book, she never received an academic position in France, in large part because departments of literary studies in France were resistant to the sociology of literature, which confronts academics with their own prejudices and beliefs in a system that prefers reproduction to innovation. Among these beliefs, the strongest and hence the most sensitive is the belief in the purity of literary autonomy that Casanovaâs work questioned, problematized, and nuanced, in the footsteps of her mentor Pierre Bourdieu and his proposal of relative artistic autonomy in his seminal book The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field (1992). Holding up a mirror to this world, Bourdieuâs Homo academicus (1984) exposed the inequalities and underlying beliefs of the French system of higher education; his work was received by the world of literary academics as was The World Republic of Letters later on. The sociology of literature isnât a comfortable partner of dialogue for those who donât wish to be confronted with the social conditions and genesis of the accepted beliefs underlying the power structures of the field in which they are active [Sapiro forthcoming].
Nevertheless, Casanova participated in the European network ESSE (Pour un espace des sciences sociales européen [For a European space of social sciences]), and she taught at the EHESS in 2003â2004, then in Geneva in 2005, at UCLA in 2006, and at Duke University from 2011 to 2015.
Pascale Casanova was also an engaged intellectual. She defended the autonomy of intellectual life and culture against the noxious effects of concentration and financial rationalization enforced on the media and publishing world, and the consequences of neo-liberal policies on public media such as Radio-France, of which she had had a bitter experience herself. Her life and work are a very noble embodiment of the engaged intellectualâs critical function, as Claire Ducournau demonstrates in the essay included in this volume.
Running counter to predictions of the decline in the global impact of French culture, and the statistics that show that only a small share of scholarly titles by female authors in particular get translated (only 15â¯% of the translations from French into English, see Sapiro 71), the worldwide reception of her work is a remarkable phenomenon that hasnât yet been sufficiently analyzed. We therefore included in this special issue two essays by David Damrosch and Magdalena RÄduÈÄ dedicated to the reception and impact of Casanovaâs The World Republic of Letters from the West to the East. In his own words, David Damroschâs essay shows âhow La République mondiale des lettres was transformed in the world republic of scholarship, and with what effects on her subsequent books.â Symmetrically, Magdalena RÄduÈÄâs essay looks into âthe fate of Pascale Casanovaâs translated work in the former communist literary spaces, where her theoretical argument about linguistic and historical dominance is a historical reality.â
2 Rethinking the International Literary Space
Based on her PhD dissertation entitled Lââ¯espace littéraire international (1997), supervised by Pierre Bourdieu, La République mondiale des lettres (Seuil, 1999) soon became a classic after its English translation The World Republic of Letters was published by Harvard UP in 2004. Thanks to its transnational approach, it had a major impact on literary studies at large and on comparative and world literature in particular. But the echo of this book went beyond literary studies and in different directions, from translation studies to sociology, to history, and even to non-academic intellectual circles, as shown in Orhan Pamukâs message on her death: âCasanovaâs World Republic of Letters is a unique book!â
Casanova describes the emergence and development of an autonomous international literary field in opposition to the instrumentalization of literature for the construction of national identities. Works and genres circulate in their original language or in translation, forming a World Republic of Letters endowed with its own specific consecrating authorities, of which the Nobel prize is the most prestigious and unanimously recognized distinction. This field is structured by unequal power relations between cultures according to their literary capital, which can be quantified through the number of works that entered the world literary canon. The most established cultures globally â the French, the English, the German, and the Russian â enjoy a clear advantage. Yet at the same time, as Casanova argued in an edited volume entitled Des littératures combatives: Lââ¯internationale des nationalismes littéraires (2011), literary nationalism has also been a way for dominated literatures to fight back against the domination active in the international literary field.
All of Casanovaâs works deal with the question of linguistic domination. In her admirable monographs Beckett, lââ¯abstracteur (1997) and Kafka en colère (2011), she connects the symbolic revolutions these writers achieved with their belonging to a âminor literatureâ in Deleuze and Guattariâs sense. For instance, she interprets Kafkaâs novels as a euphemized critique of the symbolic violence underlying the assimilationist desire of Pragueâs Jewish community. She resituated Kafkaâs choice among the options available to his generation of German-speaking Jewish intellectuals who rejected their fathersâ assimilationist model. Whereas many in his circle opted for Zionism, Kafka found in the burgeoning Yiddish theater an art that he saw as truly national and popular. An ethnologist of the Jewish people, he explored in his work, in an encrypted code, the symbolic violence that underlies assimilation, then being denounced by his Zionist friends. Kafka deals with it from multiple perspectives: as a dead end, a treason, a loss, a culpability, an individual and collective tragedy. Casanova argues that
Dans les récits et les romans, et en particulier dans Le Procès, le désir dââ¯assimilation est incarné par des personnages qui obéissent à une loi, non énoncée explicitement, mais impérative, leur imposant de se soumettre aux règles dââ¯une société qui les méprise et les humilie, sans quââ¯aucune violence physique les y contraigne et sans quââ¯ils en aient clairement conscience. Il résulte du même coup que le centre caché de lââ¯Åuvre est une réflexion (très critique) sur la domination.
Casanova, Kafka en colère, 359
In the stories and novels, particularly The Trial, the desire for assimilation is embodied in characters who obey a mandatory â though not explicitly stated â law which forces them to submit to the rules of a society that despises and humiliates them, despite the fact that no physical violence compels them to do so and they are not clearly aware of the law in question. It follows that the hidden centre of Kafkaâs oeuvre is a (highly critical) reflection on domination.
Casanova, Kafka, Angry Poet, 284
Her last book, La Langue mondiale: Traduction et domination (2015) analyzes the role of translation as a weapon against linguistic domination and as a mode of accumulating symbolic capital, beginning with the example of the translations from Latin into French in the 16th and 17th centuries and closing with a discussion of the implications of the growing domination of English.
In a conference in 2012 on the âTransformations of the Literary Fieldâ at the University of Chicago Center in Paris, she concluded her beautiful talk, âThe Greenwich Meridian: Reflections on Time in Literature,â with a true research program. Talking about the classics, the avant-garde, and books that make a major impact, she stressed that
When it comes to collective representations, the literary present is the only temporal modality tolerated in the literary world. The only recognition, the only validity, that is to say the only acceptable legitimacy in literature, is to belong in one way or another to the present. This eternal contemporaneity is probably one of the most powerful structures of the world of literature. According to the most deeply anchored representations in our literary unconscious, time does not exist; the country of literature knows no past. One of the major functions of the temporal structure of literary space could thus be to perpetuate the denial of literatureâs history.
For this reason, I think that a true collective reflection that would take this denial into account could help us reconsider the possibility of a new form of the history of literature. Instead of looking at the different types of consecration as rituals or magical processes, that is to say phenomena that escape history, we could re-historicize everything that has been arbitrarily extracted from history. And the first of these histories could be a history of the ways of making texts eternal, or, even better, to cite Borges, a âhistory of eternity.â
Casanova, âLe méridien de Greenwich,â 146, our translation.
3 Casanovaâs Legacies
Casanovaâs work has sparked many rich and fruitful debates, while inspiring new research. This volume builds on the special issue of the Journal of World Literature 5 (2020) dedicated to the work and legacies of Pascale Casanova and complements the special issue in French dedicated to Casanovaâs work (Ducournau, Leperlier, Sapiro eds., âLa littérature au-delà des nationsâ), putting forth original research inspired by different aspects of Casanovaâs work, taking it in new directions and discussing it through new case studies or new materials.The essays by David Damrosch, Magdalena RÄduÈÄ, Mads Rosendahl Thomsen, Thirthanakar Chakraborty, Tiphaine Samoyault, Michiel Leezenberg, Jing Tsu, and Madeline Bedecarré were previously published in Journal of World Literature 5:2 (2020). The essays by Claire Ducournau, Tristan Leperlier and Laurent Jeanpierre were previously published in COnTEXTES 28 (2020).
The eleven essays in this volume are divided into two parts and an introductory portrait by Claire Ducournau translated from the French special issue. The first five essays directly explore Casanovaâs theoretical ideas put forth in The World Republic of Letters, through the reception of her book in translation (David Damrosch and Magdalena RÄduÈÄ), through the development on an international scale of Pierre Bourdieuâs national field theory (Mads Rosendahl Thomsen), through a reflection on the importance of exile in her work (Laurent Jeanpierre) and through her previous book on Samuel Beckett as a testing ground for the more comprehensive theory of the international field (Thirthankar Chakraborty). The five essays included in the second part of this issue then develop Casanovaâs theoretical ideas in different directions: translation studies (Tiphaine Samoyault), transnational and plurlingual literary studies (Tristan Leperlier), premodern literary studies (Michiel Leezenberg), East Asian studies (Jing Tsu), and postcolonial studies (Madeline Bedecarré).
Tracing back Casanovaâs organically developed intellectual trajectory and work, Ducournau emphasizes her inborn avant-garde spirit that brings together a âsolitary criticismâ with a structural combativeness that she shares with her preferred authors including Kafka and Beckett. Ducournau points to âthe value of this type of writing, in the sense of how rare it is, and also its cost, insofar as it can come at a price in terms of social trajectory.â This is Pascale Casanova's life and work in a nutshell.
In a preface to the pocket edition of La République mondiale des lettres in 2008, Pascale Casanova herself reflected on The World Republicâs ambiguous new life in translation. We are pleased to include Casanovaâs Preface in this volume, translated into English for the first time, as a metapreface to the essays that follow.2 In the essay that follows his translation of her preface, David Damrosch situates Casanovaâs position in the international academic field through her own theory. Relying on this preface as well as on a wide range of other sources, Damrosch critically analyzes the international reception of her work and her lucid perception of the unequal power relations that this reception revealed within the global academic field: in the dominant Anglo-American countries, discussions mostly focus on the centrality of Paris, a claim dismissed as Eurocentric; conversely, in the dominated countries from Latin-America and Eastern Europe, it was appropriated as a weapon in the struggle against the domination of English.
The latter case is the subject of Magdalena RÄduÈÄâs essay, which gives a comparative analysis of the reception of The World Republic of Letters in three former Communist countries: Romania, Serbia, and Slovenia. The Romanian translation came out in two different editions in 2007 and 2016, presented with significantly different editorial strategies; the reception of Casanovaâs theory evolved from a rather mixed and confused initial reception that searched for a confirmation of Romaniaâs own literary canon through the writers selected by Casanova (the case of Emil Cioran) to a model for rethinking the cultural capital of Romanian literature from the point of view of the international market. Beyond a model for young writers to attain international recognition, RÄduÈÄ argues that Casanovaâs concept of literary autonomy is a powerful tool for unpacking the autonomous position embraced by writers during the Communist period as an obliquely political position.
Indeed, Casanovaâs theoretical ideas put forth in The World Republic of Letters have just as powerful an impact on nationally framed literary studies as on the more obvious fields of comparative and world literature. Mads Rosendahl Thomsenâs essay performs a circular movement: from the nationally framed theory of the literary field that goes back to Bourdieu and his Rules of Art, to its expansion as an international literary field in The World Republic of Letters, and then back to the problem of the national frame as shown in Casanovaâs last book, La Langue mondiale: Traduction et domination â or rather, as Casanova herself writes the term at times, domiNation. In this oscillation between the national and the international, Kafka and Beckett stand out as models for Casanova of migrant writers whose trajectories, as unpacked with the theoretical tools of the international literary field, can become seminal for the emerging field of migrant literature.
Interested in the theoretical question of exile as well as exiled writers in Casanovaâs works, Laurent Jeanpierre analyzes its complexity: from criticizing hegemonic languages and inventing new ones to reasserting the autonomy of âsmall nationsâ while reinforcing the national determinations of writing. But no theory stems from purely theoretical concerns. As Jeanpierre concludes, Casanova herself resonates with exiles on a personal as well as scholarly level.
Thirthankar Chakrabortyâs study of Beckett develops and enriches some of Casanovaâs insights with new materials, connecting her work on the literary revolution achieved by the author of Malone Dies with her World Republic of Letters. In Casanovaâs view, Beckettâs bilingualism and his position as an outsider at the Parisian center of the international literary space are two properties that predisposed him to achieve this revolution, which she equates to abstraction in art. Building on Beckettâs correspondence and writings Chakraborty demonstrates that this makes him a paradigmatic example of Casanovaâs argument in her comprehensive World Republic of Letters, since Paris offered Beckett a cosmopolitan and autonomous space.
The five essays included in the second part of this volume open with Tiphaine Samoyaultâs contribution to Casanovaâs approach of translation as an unequal exchange between central and peripheral literatures (Casanova 2002, 2010, 2015), in which Samoyault proposes an original theory of indirect translation. As she underscores, relay (or indirect) translation â i.e. translating from a translation rather than from the original text â is much more common than we usually think, and is mistakenly considered a decreasing phenomenon. In Samoyaultâs view, relay translation reveals more general rules of the circulation of works in translation. She argues that translation always confronts more than two texts or two languages. This invites us to rethink the role of mediators, further complicating the initial networks of literary agents as outlined in Casanovaâs works.
Building on Casanovaâs work that only touches on the problem of international linguistic areas that challenge Herderâs equation of language and nation, Tristan Leperlier proposes to define linguistic areas as âmonolingual international literary spaces that span between the unification and emancipation of (typically) national fieldsâ. The typology of linguistic areas that Leperlier develops through case studies that include Arabophone and Francophone Algerian writers complicates and takes Casanovaâs work forward by redefining the notion of field through the transnational and the plurilingual â two key-notions in world literature.
One of the principal legacies of Casanovaâs theory of the emerging world literary space lies in a direction that is not explored in her work: premodern literature and its non-European cosmopolises. Michiel Leezenbergâs innovative essay calls attention to âthe existence of a premodern and early modern transnational field of literatureâ that goes back to non-Western cosmopolitan traditions and premodern processes of vernacularization. These processes predate and are distinct from the national languages rising around 1800, which Casanova considers the inception of the modern history of the World Republic of Letters. Leezenberg argues in favor of extending Casanovaâs world republic to embrace premodern and non-European literary traditions, as he illustrates with case studies from Georgian, Kurdish, and Armenian literature within the Persianate cosmopolis.
âOf the existing approaches engaging with world literature, Pascale Casanovaâs contribution remains the most prescient and relevant to the contemporary world,â writes Jing Tsu. She argues that this is so because it maintains the presupposition that the world in world literature can only emerge in the locally sensitive relation between the social and the uniqueness and unrepeatability of the literary text. But Tsu asks what texts are seen as truly embracing the world as such. Only those of the first-tier literary agents, leaving the majority of second and third-tier agents in the shadows. Tsu proposes âthree figurative spaces for analysis: 1) the syncretic; 2) the rebel; and 3) the governedâ to think about the invisible margins of the world of world literature as illustrated in contemporary Chinese literature.
Madeline Bedecarréâs innovative research on the literary prizes awarded by the Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie looks back at Casanova from a postcolonial perspective. Combining close reading with sociological methods (interviews, analysis of promotional material and media sources, profiles of jury members and of awardees), she argues that the notion of âworld literatureâ was appropriated by the Prix des Cinq Continents in order to overcome the crisis triggered by the âManifesto for a World-Literature in French,â which criticized the notion of âfrancophonieâ for having institutionalized the persisting unequal literary relationship between France (especially Paris) and its former colonies, by separating âFrancophone literatureâ from âFrench literature.â In Bedecarréâs view, the notion of âworld literatureâ was appropriated by the prize to mask these longstanding inequalities and thus perpetuate them, all the while laying claim to cultural diversity and universalism. She shows that most of the members of the jury, wherever they come from, live in Paris; the national diversity of the prize-winners obscures the fact that French (and even Parisian) publishers are overrepresented in the list of awarded books.
Casanovaâs work stands out for our field, but also for literary studies in general, through its double call to a lucid disenchantment of literary practice as highly situated socially, economically, and politically, but also as an autonomous practice that configures its own world. As long as books circulate, in direct or indirect translation, and as long as writers think beyond the borders of language, culture, and nation, literature will have its own empire: the empire of the mind. This empire has its own agonistic history of canonical struggle, as Harold Bloom put it, but as Casanova reminds us, it is also inscribed in âa world of rivalry, struggle, and inequality,â âa world that is secret and yet perceptible by all (especially its most dispossessed members)â (The World Republic of Letters 4). In this special volume, we have tried to reconfigure a small part of Casanovaâs rich empire of the mind, her own world of letters and its legacies.
The editors would like to thank David Damrosch for reading this introduction and for providing insightful and valuable comments.
We would like to thank Didier Giner and Le Seuil for permitting the translation and David Damrosch for translating it.
Works Cited
Bourdieu, Pierre. Homo academicus. Paris: Minuit. Collection Le sens commun, 1984. Réédition augmentée dâune postface de lâauteur, 1992. Homo Academicus. Trans. Peter Collier. Stanford, California: Stanford UP, 1990.
Bourdieu, Pierre. Les Règles de lâart: Genèse et structure du champ littéraire. Paris: Seuil, 1992. The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field. Trans. Susan Emanuel. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996.
Casanova, Pascale. Beckett, lâabstracteur. Paris: Seuil, 1997. Samuel Beckett: Anatomy of a Literary Revolution. Trans. Gregory Elliott. London: Verso, 2006.
Casanova Pascale. âConsécration et accumulation de capital littéraire.â Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales. 144 (2002), 7â20. âConsecration and Accumulation of Literary Capital: Translation as Unequal Exchange.â Trans. Siobhan Brownlie. In Critical Readings in Translation Studies, ed. Mona Baker. London and New York: Routledge, 2010, 285â303.
Casanova, Pascale, ed. Des littératures combatives: Lâinternationale des nationalismes littéraires. Paris: Raisons dâagir, 2011.
Casanova, Pascale. Kafka en colère. Paris: Seuil, 2011. Kafka, Angry Poet. Trans. Chris Turner. Calcutta and London: Seagull, 2015.
Casanova, Pascale. La Langue mondiale: Traduction et domination. Paris: Seuil, 2015.
Casanova, Pascale. La République mondiale des lettres. Paris: Seuil, 1999. Rev. ed. Coll. Points 2008. The World Republic of Letters. Trans. M.B. Debevoise. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2004.
Casanova, Pascale âLe méridien de Greenwich: Réflexions sur le temps en littératureâ In Quâest-ce que le Contemporain?, ed. Lionel Ruffel. Nantes: Ãditions Cécile Defaut, 2010, 113â146. A former version appeared in English: âThe Literary Greenwich Meridian: some thoughts on the temporal forms of literary belief,â Field Day Review, 4 (2008), 6â23.
Damrosch, David. What Is World Literature? Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 2003.
Ducournau, Claire, Tristan Leperlier, Gisèle Sapiro, eds. âLa littérature au-delà des nations. Hommage à Pascale Casanova.â COnTEXTE, 28 (2020).
Moretti, Franco. âConjectures on World Literature.â New Left Review 1 (2000), 1â12.
Moretti, Franco. âMore Conjectures.â New Left Review 20 (2003), 73â81.
Sapiro, Gisèle. âWhat Factors Determine the International Circulation of Scholarly Books? The Example of Translations between English and French in the Era of Globalization.â In The Social and Human Sciences in Global Power Relations, eds. J. Heilbron, G. Sora, and Th. Boncourt. London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2018, 59â93.
Sapiro, Gisèle. The Sociology of Literature. Trans. Madeline Bedecarré and Ben Libman. Stanford: Stanford UP, Forthcoming.