Pascale Casanova shows us a combative Kafka who is at once ethnologist and investigator, unstintingly denouncing all forms of domination with the kind of tireless rage that was his hallmark. In so doing, she sheds light on the deep-seated reasons for Kafka’s anger

Pascale Casanova, Kafka, Angry Poet, Trans. by Chris Turner, Seagull Books, 2015.


Franz Kafka was one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century. His writing contributed greatly to existentialism, and the term “Kafkaesque” is now synonymous with the literature of the surreal, the complex and the illogical. His works sustained themes of violence, family conflict, bizarre and all-powerful bureaucracies, and fantastical transformations. However, in Kafka, Angry Poet, Pascale Casanova looks past the customary analyses of Kafka’s work and dives deep into his mind, examining his motives rather than the results. She bravely asks the question, “What if Kafka were the most radical of social critics? What if he had actually attempted to pull the wool over our eyes with narratives that are, in fact, subtly deceptive?”
The hypothesis she develops is that Kafka began with an awareness of the tragic fate of the German-speaking Jews of early twentieth-century Prague and was subsequently led to reflect on other forms of power, such as male dominance and colonial oppression. The stories produced as a result were traps for the unwary, throwing the reader off the scent with the use of unreliable and even deceitful narrators. Curiously, says Casanova, it is not in literature that one finds the answers to these questions but in German ethnology, a field which, as an intellectual of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Kafka knew well. Through her detailed research, Casanova shows us a combative Kafka who is at once ethnologist and investigator, unstintingly denouncing all forms of domination with the kind of tireless rage that was his hallmark. In so doing, she sheds light on the deep-seated reasons for Kafka’s anger.

Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, Trans. by M. B. DeBevoise, Harvard University Press, 2007.

read it at Google Books

The "world of letters" has always seemed a matter more of metaphor than of global reality. In this book, Pascale Casanova shows us the state of world literature behind the stylistic refinements--a world of letters relatively independent from economic and political realms, and in which language systems, aesthetic orders, and genres struggle for dominance. Rejecting facile talk of globalization, with its suggestion of a happy literary "melting pot," Casanova exposes an emerging regime of inequality in the world of letters, where minor languages and literatures are subject to the invisible but implacable violence of their dominant counterparts.Inspired by the writings of Fernand Braudel and Pierre Bourdieu, this ambitious book develops the first systematic model for understanding the production, circulation, and valuing of literature worldwide. Casanova proposes a baseline from which we might measure the newness and modernity of the world of letters--the literary equivalent of the meridian at Greenwich. She argues for the importance of literary capital and its role in giving value and legitimacy to nations in their incessant struggle for international power. Within her overarching theory, Casanova locates three main periods in the genesis of world literature--Latin, French, and German--and closely examines three towering figures in the world republic of letters--Kafka, Joyce, and Faulkner. Her work provides a rich and surprising view of the political struggles of our modern world--one framed by sites of publication, circulation, translation, and efforts at literary annexation.


This is a marvelous study of the international networks and ethnic forcefields out of which a modern world literature has emerged. In drawing a map of the literary globe, Pascale Casanova shows just how different it is from any political map ever framed. Unlike many previous comparativists, she shows just how many of the texts of literary modernism have been contributed by peoples without financial or political power. This is a brave, audacious and luminous analysis, and a bracing challenge to those who still believe in the nation as an explanatory category. This book will provoke debate for years to come. - Declan Kiberd

As a researcher, Pascale Casanova specializes in the exception. Along with a literary knowledge that is exceptional in its breadth and depth, she possesses a theoretical knowledge that is truly vast and wielded with great authority. In pursuing this immense topic - the universe of relations that constitute the "World Republic of Letters" - she has set herself a daunting challenge: that of constructing, and empirically verifying, a theoretical model for the "fabric of the universal." - Pierre Bourdieu

The book is remarkable for its multidisciplinary and transnational approach, and for the response it has excited in Japan as well as many other countries, where it will surely continue to inspire lively debate. - Hidehiro Tachibana

Casanova's book is a major contribution to modern literary theory. It effectively shatters national boundaries. - Gilles Lapouge, O Estado de São Paolo

Corpus literarium universalis… What is interesting is that Casanova reads a series of concrete events in the history of the "republic," showing the need… for constant interpellation of aesthetic and linguistic notions. - Patricia de Souza, El País

The great majority of writers in a language outside the Atlantic core who have gained an international reputation have done so by introductory passage through the medium of French, not English: from Borges, Mishima and Gombrowicz, to Carpentier, Mahfouz, Krleza or Cortazar, up to Gao Xinjiang, the recent Chinese Nobel Prize-winner. The system of relations that has produced this pattern of Parisian consecration is the object of Pascale Casanova's [The World Republic of Letters], [an] outstanding example of an imaginative synthesis with strong critical intent...Here the national bounds of Bourdieu's work have been decisively broken, in a project that uses his concepts of symbolic capital and the cultural field to construct a model of the global inequalities of power between different national literatures, and the gamut of strategies that writers in languages at the periphery of the system of legitimation have used to try to win a place at the centre. Nothing like this has been attempted before. The geographical range of Casanova's materials, from Madagascar to Romania, Brazil to Switzerland, Croatia to Algeria; the clarity and trenchancy of the map of unequal relations she offers; and, not least, the generosity with which the dilemmas and ruses of the disadvantaged are explored, make her book kindred to the French élan behind the World Social Forum. It might be called a literary Porto Alegre. That implies a beginning, with much fierce argument and discussion to come. But whatever the outcome of ensuing criticisms or objections, The World Republic of Letters--empire more than a republic, as Casanova shows--is likely to have the same sort of liberating impact at large as Said's Orientalism, with which it stands comparison. - Perry Anderson London Review of Books

There is a great deal more to this path-breaking study, not least a superb sketch of Franz Kafka, who is depicted caught between Yiddish, Czech and German, high modernism and popular nationalism. There are portraits of exiles or 'translated men' such as Joyce and Samuel Beckett who are adrift between cultures, adept at being homeless in a whole number of languages. And there are snapshots of 'assimilations' such as V S Naipaul, who eagerly identify with the imperial heritage that uprooted their own people. Casanova's range of literary allusions, from Berlin to Havana, Norway to Somalia, is astonishing...This book, which unlike many other works of literary theory is written (or at any rate translated) with exemplary lucidity, represents a milestone in the history of modern literary thought. - Terry Eagleton New Statesman 2005-04-11

Learned and important...It denies the existence of a so-called 'world republic of letters' that is open to all talents and that judges according to universal aesthetic standards...Casanova remaps the fantasy of a homogenized global space into regions of centers and peripheries, rigidly divided into a 'tacit and implacable hierarchy.' Between these regions she identifies only a few gates, guarded by powerful gatekeepers with murky agendas...[She] argues that as concentrations of literary 'capital' are uneven, so are judgments of literary value...The book offers several excellent analyses of 'small national literatures'...This is an original book. - K. Tölölyan 


"Casanova's analysis relies heavily on Bourdieu's model of the literary field organized along market lines, though she alters his nationally based concept of symbolic and literary capital to render it international in scope." - Emilie Bickerton, Bookforum

"Casanova tends to treat literary intentions and judgments as strategies in a competitive struggle. Consequently, she sometimes portrays literature as just another social game in which the only things that matter are seizing and maintaining dominance. But to stress her framework’s positive contributions, it provides several useful theoretical tools for identifying uniquely literary forms of power." - Thomas Hove, Review of Contemporary Fiction

"National literature is now rather an unmeaning term; the epoch of world literature is at hand, and every one must strive to hasten its approach," declared J.W. Goethe in 1827. He was right that a global literary culture would be generated by a "commerce of ideas among peoples" led by "the translator as a mediator seeking to promote this universal spiritual commerce and setting himself the task of assisting it progress." What Goethe missed is just how ferociously Darwinian the market place of world literature would be. On the one hand, technology has made it easier than ever before to sample writing from around the world. Yet the decline of books available in English translation suggests that, in the battle for survival, translators aren't proving to be all that fit. Goethe's epoch will not be coming soon.
In her enticingly speculative study, Pascale Casanova sees the history of the world republic of letters as a geopolitical demolition derby in which outsiders crash in while insiders fend off challenges to their authority as creators and arbiters of literary value. In contrast to the air-brushed display windows of book review supplements and literary magazines, authors are doomed to run in an ugly rat race -- they either win renown or lose out. "It is the competition among its members that defines and unites the system while at the same time marking its limits," she writes, "not every writer proceeds in the same way, but all writers attempt to enter the same race, and all of them struggle, albeit with unequal advantages, to attain the same goal: literary legitimacy."
Conflicts between the powerful and the powerless and clashes among authorities protective of their turf and influence dictate the winners and losers, who is translated and who isn't, who is reviewed and who is ignored. Over the centuries selected European countries have been acknowledged around the world as the centers of literary authority. Casanova traces the battle for domination back to the 16th century, when European vernaculars (French, English, and Spanish) asserted their independence and gained literary power by absorbing Greek and Latin models. Germany joined the club in the 18th century when Goethe supplied the aesthetic entry fee. The members fought amongst themselves for dominance until after World War II, at which point countries from around the globe demanded to be taken seriously.
For Casanova, the Darwinian set-up creates a destructive paradox. The literary power brokers in London, Paris, and New York need to find new blood, but the latter must not be so formally innovative or culturally alien as to challenge their power or perspective. Thus the new, when it is not ignored, is misinterpreted or neutered. The World Republic of Letters positions itself as a polemic for the overlooked: "a sort of critical weapon in the service of all deprived and dominated writers on the periphery of the literary world." In a culture as provincial as America's, any call for a recognition of international writing is to be commended. But, in truth, some writers are stuck on the margins because that's where they belong, not because they are the victims of a lit-crit goon squad.
Casanova's romanticization of the little guy as too idiosyncratic to be accepted by the mainstream leads to some strained considerations of how Kafka, Joyce, and Faulkner made their way into the mainstream. Worse, her categorization of writers and countries into topdogs and underdogs leads her into a nasty form of geopolitical correctness: a world class writer such as V.S. Naipaul is lambasted because he admires the British literary tradition rather than rebels against it. Her argument is so dependent on heroic writers jumping the barricades of staid convention that she is unable to talk about the crucial role of cooperation and alliances in the literary world that have brought attention to writers on the fringes.
But these are the enviable questions raised by an ambitious book that proffers such a provocatively argumentative thesis. If nothing else, Casanova's Darwinian perspective on literary success undercuts the stereotypical image of a peaceable kingdom where herds of contented classic authors and contemporary big names graze free under the watchful eyes of sweet-tempered, open-minded shepherds in the publishing and critical establishment. Written without jargon and wide-ranging in its references, The World Republic of Letters is a marvelously stimulating look at the realpolitik of world literature and the authorities who run the marketplace of ideas. - Bill Marx
https://www.wordswithoutborders.org/book-review/the-world-republic-of-letters/


The World Republic of Letters considers literary reputation and success on a global scale, looking at what accounts for some writers finding acceptance internationally, while others don't (or remain only regionally successful), as well as the influence these writers have. Casanova describes an "international literary space", formed in the 16th century, with literature travelling across borders -- and competing for success. The resulting world republic of letters isn't one where every book of any origin has an equal chance: dominant languages and cultures strive to maintain their position, while authors from smaller languages and less established literary traditions compete for attention (often infiltrating the dominant tradition in order to piggy-back onto success that way). Influential arbiters of quality emerge -- not merely individuals or specific publications, but geographic centres (Paris, in particular, Casanova argues): if you can make it there (i.e. find success and approval), you've made it everywhere.
       Casanova's focus is on what can be called 'serious' literature, i.e. she doesn't treat the case of the airport bestseller (of which Dan Brown's international hit, The Da Vinci Code is the current prime example). In part this is because her interest is in demonstrating the effect of critical-intellectual approval: the embrace of an author, style, school, or type by an intellectual establishment (generally: that in Paris) as seal of approval leading to global success (and imitation). This (slight) limitation to the book is understandable -- Dan Brown and writers of his ilk look to have little lasting effect on literature, and their books little staying power (over the long term) -- but it's a shame that these sorts of titles aren't addressed, as this interesting phenomenon on the periphery of the world republic of letters also has an (arguably growing) effect on it.
       Casanova shows the historic development of literature across borders, making a good case for Paris establishing itself quickly -- and lastingly ("at least until the 1960s", she suggests) -- as the focal point: the place where literatures converge, where success is ordained. She notes the importance of history: a national past and (literary) tradition are prerequisites for literary acceptance. The past provides a necessary frame of reference for literary works, whether they build on it or challenge it. Casanova insists that the world of letters relies on these foundations, a main reason why 'outside' literature has it so hard breaking in. France was particularly well-positioned with regards to history, having a long, impressive tradition, but one that was also both sufficiently open to the new and marked by upheaval (unlike, for example, sclerotic Spain).
       Paris is her centre: writers from the provinces gravitate to cities, writers from small cultures gravitate to larger ones -- and Paris was, especially for much of the 20th century, the ultimate destination: As she notes, many authors actually moved to Paris (from Strindberg, Stein, and Joyce to Kundera and Handke), though equally significant is the role of Paris (and the French publishers and literary establishment) in 'crowning' writers: from Borges to Danilo Kiš it was acceptance in Paris that led to the international breakthrough -- an impressive (and continuing) "power of consecration":

The belief in the power of the capital of the arts is so strong that not only do artists throughout the world unreservedly accept the preeminence of Paris; owing to the extraordinary concentration of intellectual talent there that follows from this belief, Paris has come the place where books -- submitted to critical judgment and transmuted -- can be denationalized and their authors made universal.

       Historic examples support her position; of particular interest are those regarding language, the writers who turned to French, from Strindberg's attempts to conquer Paris by writing in French, to Beckett's bi-lingual work to Cioran (and now Kundera) turning entirely to writing French. (While there are also examples of authors who turned to writing in English -- Conrad and Nabokov are both mentioned -- this is one of the areas that deserves more discussion, as English has certainly become a contender for the language to dominate world literature.)
       Looking at everything from the role of translation (literature must be accessible to conquer; the text available only in a language that few can read is terribly handicapped) to attempts at rebellion and assimilation, Casanova's book is an impressive examination of the global literary landscape. She believes her analysis can also "give the principles of a new method for interpreting literary texts", which certainly is of some interest. The more obvious point of interest, however, is the fascinating picture on offer of what drives literary production (and consumption) and what shapes them: the literary world as a sort of market.
       The World Republic of Letters deserves much closer scrutiny and discussion, defying quick review-summary. Fairly straightforward and accessible, it makes for a surprisingly good read for a work of literary theory, and offers a great deal of food for thought. Highly recommended to anyone interested in publishing or reading. - http://www.complete-review.com/reviews/publish/casanop.htm


lthough there are some minor differences, English’s discussion of this development parallels Pascale Casanova’s in her rather brilliant book “The World Republic of Letters” (translated from the French by M. B. DeBevoise; Harvard; $35). Casanova is also writing about the system in which books circulate in the competition for recognition. The standard practice is to understand works of literature as products of a national tradition, as examples of French literature or American literature; Casanova’s argument is that, on the contrary, the system has always been global. As she puts it, literatures are “not a pure emanation of national identity; they are constructed through literary rivalries, which are always denied, and struggles, which are always international.”
Casanova thinks that every ambitious writer aspires to be recognized for meeting the standards of the metropole. In her book, the metropole is Paris, the eternal center of the literary universe (she is, after all, French); but it might be London or New York as well. “Paris” is the place where art and literature are always truly modern and up to date, and the rest of the world measures its lateness by that meridian. For centuries, meeting the standard of Paris meant escaping the provincialism of one’s own culture—the constraints imposed by the Church, or the state, or the Party, which all want literature to serve their interests—and making art for the sake of art. James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, Gertrude Stein and Richard Wright, Milan Kundera and Danilo Kiš all went to Paris in order to escape the fate of being national writers. They assimilated, not to Frenchness (as Casanova points out, Joyce and Beckett, although they lived in Paris for much of their lives, had no interest in French literary life) but to the universal modern idea of the artist. Now, she thinks, the strategy for acceptance has shifted from assimilation to differentiation, and differentiation means not being modern.
The challenge now is to combine elements of non-metropolitan indigenousness with elements that metropolitan readers recognize as “literary.” A subnational novel, such as “The Bone People,” must be what English calls “world-readable.” The judges of the Booker Prize probably didn’t know the difference between Maoris and Mallomars, but they knew, instinctively, how a work of “Maori fiction” should look. It should be a hybrid of postmodernist heteroglossia (multiple and high-low discursive registers, mixed genres, stories within stories) and pre-modernist narrative (conventional morality, the simulation of an oral story-telling tradition). Between them, English and Casanova list the features of the world-literature prototype: a trauma-and-recovery story, with magic-realist elements, involving abuse and family dysfunction, that arrives at resolution by the invocation of spiritual or holistic verities. If you add in a high level of technical and intellectual sophistication, this is a pretty accurate generic description of a novel by Toni Morrison. - Louis Menand
read more here


What are you doing? I mean, right now. You’re reading a book review. A review of a book that, as it happens, is almost certain to become quite famous among intellectuals around the world over the next few years. And the reason it will become so famous is, in part, because of reviews like this one. After all, Perry Anderson, writing in the London Review of Books, has proclaimed that La République mondiale des lettres “is likely to have the same sort of liberating impact…as Said’s Orientalism, with which it stands comparison”–a prophecy that, because it is by Perry Anderson, and because it is the London Review of Books, is, to an extent, self-fulfilling. So by reading this review–becoming one of the people who’ve heard of the book, who’ve begun to form an opinion about it, who might even buy it, read it, discuss it, cite it–you’re not only learning about its impending fame, you’re becoming part of the process by which that fame is established, a process the book itself calls “legitimation.” (Translation, the act that has turned La République mondiale des lettres into The World Republic of Letters, is another step in that process.) And this is perfectly apt, because the mechanisms of legitimation–the global economy of prestige that ushers some authors into the international literary sphere while keeping others shut out–is exactly what Pascale Casanova’s brilliant, groundbreaking book is all about.
To understand why it’s groundbreaking, it helps to know how the international literary sphere is usually thought about–or rather, not thought about. Academic departments, literary academies, histories and reference works, honors and prizes: The institutions of literary life almost invariably partition the world of literature into discrete, autonomous national traditions–English over here, American over there; Italian in this classroom, Spanish in that; German Romanticism, French Symbolism, the Russian novel. Even the Nobel Prize, our one global literary honor, makes a point of emphasizing the national provenance of its laureates, so that it is understood that it is often a country as much as an author that is being recognized, and that the consecration of, say, a Saramago, shuts the door on all other Portuguese writers for the foreseeable future. As for the books that enter our national literary space from the outside (especially from outside the English-speaking world), do we ever think about why some reach us and not others? Where do translated writers “come from”? Are they simply the most celebrated authors in their own countries? (In fact, they often aren’t.) If we think about these questions at all, we probably assume that the writers we become aware of are just better than the ones we don’t. (But “better” according to what criteria, enforced by whom?) In other words, we’ve bought into the myth of an international literary meritocracy, or, in Casanova’s words, “the fable of an enchanted world…where universality reigns through liberty and equality…the notion of literature as something pure, free, and universal.” - William Deresiewicz
 read more here: The Nation


A heroically ambitious new book (or, rather, a newly translated book) aims to put this quest for literary hegemony into a deep historical context. The World Republic of Letters by Pascale Casanova (translated by M B DeBevoise; Harvard University Press, £22.50) travels far and wide, from French Renaissance disputes over the language of literature to the recent fashion for post-colonial fiction - from Ronsard to Rushdie.

But its core concerns the idea of literature, and the metropolitan institutions that define it, as a system of power: of gate-keeping, border controls, admissions and refusals. Casanova (well-known in France as a critic and broadcaster) follows the battle waged by writers on the margins of the system to carve out a space in which a truly autonomous "republic of letters" can flourish. Against or within the grand imperial capitals, notably Paris and London, pioneering outsiders such as Ibsen, Joyce, Kafka, Beckett and now Nuruddin Farah struggle to create a new kind of "universality that escapes the centres" - a literary land of their own.
Casanova's book is a demanding, rewarding read, but no more opaque than the work of Edward Said - which it often recalls. The breadth of this canvas means that, for Anglophones, much of the appeal lies in her mind-stretching ability to match familiar anecdotes of revolt or migration with linked histories from elsewhere. So she will compare VS Naipaul's pursuit of a "pure" Englishness with the Romanian EM Cioran's fight to command a classical French prose. Or she contrasts Ibsen's reception in London (as social realist) and in Paris (as soulful symbolist). Or she sets James Kelman's use of Glaswegian as a literary idiom alongside Mario de Andrade's groundbreaking Brazilian folk epic, Macunaima.
Covering so much territory, Casanova very occasionally stumbles into error, truism or else a too-familiar type of Parisian radical hauteur. All in all, however, she draws a remarkably rich and persuasive map of global writing and publishing not as "an enchanted world that exists outside time", but as a battlefield on which dominant languages and cultures have always wielded the heavy weapons. Every globe-trotting publisher who attends the London Book Fair ought to read it. Of course, not a single one of them will. - Boyd Tonkin                  
read more here: The Independent
 

London Review of Books
 

Pascale Casanova, Samuel Beckett: Anatomy of a Literary Revolution, Verso; Reprint ed., 2019.


In this fascinating new exploration of Samuel Beckett's work, Pascale Casanova argues that Beckett's reputation rests on a pervasive misreading of his oeuvre, which neglects entirely the literary revolution he instigated. Reintroducing the historical into the heart of this body of work, Casanova provides an arresting portrait of Beckett as radically subversive—doing for writing what Kandinsky did for art—and in the process presents the key to some of the most profound enigmas of Beckett's writing.


Pascale Casanova: Beckett's combinatorial art