Europäische Lektüren jenseits von Europa: Weltliteratur, literarischer Kanon und die Bildung in Europa

Abstract

European Readings beyond Europe: World Literature, Literary Canon and Education in Europe. The present essay discusses the concepts “literary canon”, “world literature”, “classic authors”, and “literary masterworks”. Moreover, it summarises their origins and describes the usage of these concepts. The aim is to update these terms to current validity and to suggest an appropriate use of them in the educational and academic realm. For this purpose, some major works of European literature are contrasted with modern bestseller books (e.g. “high literature” as for instance “Bildungsroman” with “amusement novels”, fantasy, etc.). In addition to that, the article contrasts private with educational and academic readings (literary works read by students at universities and schools). Merging the conclusions together with the pertinent anthropological criteria, the essay suggests a programme of European readings that does not refuse to take into account the concepts of classic authors (Calvino) and of Bildung (Schwanitz). At the same time, it responds to the social reality of our time and of our European cities. Overall, this approach mediates between Italo Calvino’s justification of reading classic authors and Harold Bloom’s idea of reading as a lonely, quiet, and profound exercise, at the same time emotional as well as existential, carried out with a certain dose of (self-)irony. On his part, Calvino refused aesthetic criteria, such as outstanding unity and exemplary harmony, to characterise a reading as an extreme experience and process of initiation at the interfaces where classic authors, canon, and ‘Weltliteratur’ connect with the reader’s individual experience. In doing so, Calvino sticks to the individual practice of reading and provides 15 arguments in favour of books that are, on the one hand, sustainably present in the collective memory as well as in the individual subconscious and, on the other hand, contribute to individual and collective self-determination. They assign a fund of readings with permanent validity because of their constant renewal and enduring effect over the centuries, in combination with their impact on the individual biographies of single persons. In this sense, the article argues in favour of establishing humanistic canons at universities and schools that can make use of the performative impulses a reference system like this offers, in order to contribute to more complex ideas than those texts that are produced by the consumer society and the mass media day by day. Getting to know oneself and the others, deepening the mutual understanding – this could be supported by a canon of European literature.