Questions: World Literature Debates: Damrosch, Casanova, Moretti

Question 1

A scholar argues that One Hundred Years of Solitude is 'world literature' because it is a high-quality novel representing Latin American culture. Which theorist's framework would most directly challenge this rationale by insisting on a different criterion entirely?

• A. Damrosch, because he focuses on how the novel circulates and is refracted in translation, not on its cultural representativeness or intrinsic quality
• B. Casanova, because she would evaluate only the novel's narrative structure, not its cultural origin
• C. Moretti, because he denies that any single novel can be world literature without statistical confirmation
• D. All three would accept this rationale since they share a common definition of literary quality

Answer: (A)

Damrosch defines world literature as a mode of reading enabled by circulation and translation — what matters is how a text travels and is refracted across cultures, not whether it is high-quality or culturally representative. The rationale given ('high-quality,' 'represents Latin American culture') simply bypasses his framework. Casanova would also challenge it differently — she would ask whether the novel received consecration from a dominant center — and Moretti wouldn't assess individual novels at all. Damrosch's challenge is the most direct refutation of the quality-and-representativeness rationale.

Question 2

Moretti's proposal for 'distant reading' is provocative within literary studies. Which description best captures what he means and why it matters?

• A. Reading slowly and carefully across many traditions, giving each text equal attention regardless of canonical status
• B. Using computational and statistical methods to identify structural patterns across large corpora, trading textual detail for breadth across the full archive of world literature
• C. Training specialists in multiple national literatures who can then synthesize their close readings into global patterns
• D. Identifying the most important world texts by measuring how widely they have been translated

Answer: (B)

Distant reading means using quantitative and computational tools to analyze patterns in corpora too large for any individual to read — sacrificing the close textual attention most literary scholars prize in exchange for genuine breadth. The debate it provokes is really about what literary study is for: is understanding literature a matter of engaging deeply with individual texts, or of identifying large-scale structural patterns? Options A, C, and D all describe reading practices still grounded in individual texts; only B captures Moretti's actual methodological proposal.

Question 3

According to Damrosch, a text becomes world literature primarily by being written in a major world language so that many readers can access it without translation.

• T. True
• F. False

Answer: False

This directly inverts Damrosch's position. He defines world literature as a mode of reading enabled by translation and circulation beyond a text's culture of origin — translation is not an obstacle but the very mechanism by which world literature is created. A text written in English that never travels doesn't become world literature on his account, while a text originally written in Bengali that circulates widely in translation does. The language of composition is incidental; what matters is the movement across cultural distance.

Question 4

Casanova's world-system framework and Moretti's distant reading approach both challenge the traditional literary-critical practice of evaluating literature through close reading of individual texts.

• T. True
• F. False

Answer: True

This is genuinely true of both theorists, though for very different reasons. Casanova's framework redirects attention from the text itself to its structural position in the global literary hierarchy — consecration, circulation, and power relations between center and periphery. Moretti explicitly replaces close reading with statistical and computational analysis of corpora. Neither framework asks 'what does this text mean?' in the traditional hermeneutic sense. Damrosch, by contrast, retains a role for close reading, focusing on what happens in the act of reading across cultural distance.

Question 5

What is the key methodological disagreement between Moretti and Damrosch about how to study world literature, and what does each approach reveal that the other tends to miss?

Model answer: Moretti argues that world literature is too vast for individual close reading and proposes distant reading — statistical analysis of large corpora — to identify structural patterns (e.g., how novelistic form diffused globally in the 19th century). Damrosch argues that world literature is a mode of reading constituted by the encounter with a text across cultural distance, focusing on what is gained and lost in translation and circulation. Moretti's approach reveals macro-scale structural patterns invisible at the level of individual texts but misses the specific textual and translational dynamics that make any given text's world career meaningful. Damrosch illuminates those particular dynamics but cannot scale to the full archive. The methodological disagreement is ultimately about what counts as evidence in literary study.

Both theorists take seriously the challenge of world literature's scale, but draw opposite methodological conclusions. Moretti treats scale as a reason to abandon close reading; Damrosch treats the cross-cultural reading encounter as irreducibly important. Recognizing this as a genuine methodological debate — not just a disagreement about facts — is central to understanding these debates as situated positions rather than competing objective definitions.