From 1828 to 1835, when Goethe was introducing his idea of world literature to the European public, in Slovenia Matija Čop and France Prešeren carried out the complex process of culturally transferring the Schlegel brothers' romantic cosmopolitanism. In this way they sought to substantiate the emerging and peripheral Slovenian literature, which was embedded in the national movement, with the universality of esthetic humanism and, through references to the repertoires of European literary traditions from Antiquity to Romanticism, to establish it as a modern classic at the world level. Čop and Prešeren carried out Goethe's idea of world literature without using this concept. However, it is highly likely that Čop also became acquainted with Goethe's first remarks on Weltliteratur.
COBISS.SI-ID: 33419821
This discussion is derived from Samuel Weber's current thesis that the humanities today, which also include the study of literature, demand new consideration of the singular, which means that in the complex network of cultural memory and cultural transfers it is necessary to keep records of exhaustive mapping of traces - here, of course, "traces of differences" is meant - that continually reestablish the singular manifestation of literature in a certain space and ensure its vitality.
COBISS.SI-ID: 33421357
A decade after Franco Moretti's plea for the distant reading of world literature, its critiques are culminating in, say, Michael Holquist's dismissal of distant reading on behalf of Jakobsonian philology. Distant reading, however, can indeed be charged with denouncing close reading, but not Jakobson. The formal "jumps" reconstructed by Moretti via quantitative analyses of the longue durée of forms activate what Roman Jakobson calls the "poetic function of language". Moreover, Jakobson is ignored by the very historiography that confronts Moretti's theory of world literature with local literary facts that are said to deserve canonisation. These critiques fail to see that theories can be falsified only by stronger theories, not by facts, and tha t Moretti's local facts not in the core's canon, but in the peripheries exploited by the core, may be a good starting point.
COBISS.SI-ID: 46342498