TY  - JOUR
A1  - Ette, Ottmar
T1  - Toward a Polylogical Philology of the Literatures of the World
JF  - Modern language quarterly : a journal of literary history
N2  - As the world cannot be adequately understood from the vantage point of a single language, the literatures of the world can no longer be trimmed to a single world literature in the Goethean sense. This recognition bodes well for the future of philology and of literary production. Through multiperspectival writing, knowledge of life may be attainable without being reduced to a single political, medial, cartographical, geocultural, or aesthetic logic. As a laboratory for polylogical thinking, literature does not represent reality, as Erich Auerbach put it. Rather, it represents multiple lived, experienced, or relivable realities. Whoever is open to a polylogical reception of the literatures of the world can perceive and experience how life knowledge transforms into lived knowledge and how knowledge for survival turns into knowledge for living together. However, literature can be more than it is only if it stays aware of the void, of lack, of privation, of the interminable: aware of the end that never is an end. Such a planetary concept of the literatures of the world offers valuable opportunities to all those who do not fall into the trap of contenting themselves with a supposed abundance of text.
KW  - literatures of the world
KW  - multiperspectival writing
KW  - polylogical philology
KW  - transculturation
KW  - knowledge for living
Y1  - 2016
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-3464841
SN  - 0026-7929
VL  - 77
SP  - 143
EP  - 173
PB  - Duke Univ. Press
CY  - Durham
ER  -