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Originally Posted by pony

do you guys think there is such a thing as national literature?

short answer: yes.
i might give a long answer later.

Originally Posted by pony

we talked about it in class yesterday and I am unsure about where i stand. i mean, i do think one could count e.g. the great american novels as national literature but then again, it still "belongs to the world". aren't all books like the same 7 stories with different names, places,... ?

i dont know about "the same 7 stories." you might be reading them wrong, ha ha-- i mean, through some reductionist lens rather than all their glorious detail.

and OF COURSE literature belongs to the world. that's a given. but i think where you read changes how you read. e.g., for me, as a kid growing up in latin america, tom sawyer and huck finn were adventure books-- stuff for kids, go in a cave, get on a raft, etc. but for 'mericans, these are foundational books deeply embedded in the national mythology. moby dick-- same thing. fucking americans and their moby dick. (okay, i haven't ready moby dick.)

anyway, as a latin american, knowing that we are not the center of the world, we devour everything from everywhere. but you notice, looking from outside, how certain "big" cultures tend to read themselves-- the french read the french and have their own shit going on. the british, same thing. americans, they read the british because that's their past, and then they read themselves. every now and then these people will discover some "exotic" foreign author and adopt them briefly. but it's a small digression in the self-propelled national debate that deals with their own questions and problems, trying to deal with their own questions and problems.

so there you have a national literature. because i can read goethe with great curiosity but to a german it will speak on a different level. when i read shakespeare i was like "wow, this fucker really knows how people think" but it didn't speak to me like the ancestor of my consciousness. it's not in my tradition. same thing with moby fucking dick-- everyone can read it, but protestants will get it on a different level i suppose. milton: for me, boring, for the english, something to do with cromwell, history, and the national literature. everyone gets something else.

Originally Posted by pony

and who writes the national lit of a country? someone who as born there, who lived there most of their life, a citizen of it?

it varies. in latin america the national literatures are a brew of precolumbian oral traditions and the writing of the first explorers and conquerors, who made more of a mark in the lands they invaded than in the lands they left. (e.g. bartolome de las casas is more widely read in latin amercian than in spain). then it was generally people who grew out of those cultures but you also had explorers… oh, take humboldt. is humboldt big in germany? no? he was fucking HUGE in latin america. massively important. he invented teh continent, in a way. anyway, i digress.

tldr: it's not where you come from, it's what you adopt as yours.

another example of national literature, in the usa: the fucking king james bible. it's some jewish collection of fairytales translated by renaissance brits, so it wasn't written here, but it became the book everyone had in early america and i'd argue is at the root of america's national literature.

Originally Posted by pony

maybe there is no such thing as a national literature. at least not in present day? mean everyone can go everywhere, travel is relatively cheap and easy and everyone is on the internet... isn't it weird to think of some lit works as national literature?

if you're talking about the disintegration of the nation state in the face of global late capitalist culture i'll say sure, maybe everyone has a macdonalds, but politics is still very much local and "national" centers of concern and their discourse will survive for a long time. plus there's language, where literature proper operates. so there's still a national culture, and there's still a national literature.

looking at contemporary american literature, for example, i am interested in very little-- i see a lot of first world problems and superficial wankery, and it puts me to sleep. i don't share their vapid concerns or their nihilistic cynicism or their sense of entitlement. had i grown up here, on the other hand, i'd be narcissistically praising "oh, that's just like my life!" "oh, i know people like that", and "oh, this shit is so deep" but no, they fucking bore me, the spoiled brats, for the most part. so i'm not part of the "national audience." i'm a migrant mutt and on the outside. i look at american literature from teh outside. and i actually like american outsiders--people who aren't a part of the national discourse but rather write about very small worlds that interest me. even the "us latino" shit, which is so full of stereotypes. so i'd rather read a dead russian, or a dead crazy german, or a mummified greek, or a dead horny french, or a dead gay gringo, or a dead racist spaniard, or a how-to book, at this point anyway. please don't ask me to read the stuff at bookstore windows.

question for you: is kafka the national literature of where? of austria? of the czechs? of german-speaking jews? of where?