The doing and undoing of global literature : myth, microcosm and atopia in triestine writing

The present study brings the fragmented traditions of Triestine literary culture to bear on contemporary preoccupations with world literature at a time when globalization is widely perceived as the predominant historical paradigm that informs modernity.  What I am calling “global literature” refers to the refashioning of Weltliteratur – envisioned by Goethe and translated as “world literature” or “littérature universelle” – by discourses on global culture and post-nationalism.  However, when literary studies take on questions of global literature they are faced with a problem, navigating the universal idea of Goethe’s paradigm between the Scylla of a relativist, occidental internationalism and the Charybdis of a dehumanized, atopian globalism.  Proponents of world literature who lean towards the former position gain an institutional foothold by working with the implicit hypothesis that nations are based in language, which underwrites the relationship between world literature and national literatures.  The universality of this implicit hypothesis is what Triestine writing disproves.   In this study, I argue that Triestine writing in the first decades of the twentieth century acts as a precursor to thinking about global literary culture for the twenty-first century.  It has its own economy of sense, whereby it doesn’t fit into literary nationalisms, but it doesn’t fall into atopian globalism either.  It is not emphatically opposed to national literature; rather it does not admit national traditions to take root.  Triestine writers expressed a desire for a sense of unity and belonging, as well as a critical conscience that undoes that desire.  It resists the idealization of its particularities, and never successfully coalesces into a unified literary tradition.  Consequently, Trieste has often been thought of as a non-place and its literature as antiliterature.   In bypassing the territorial imperatives of the Italian national tradition – as the case of Italo Svevo illustrates – Triestine writing was later caught up in the literary-cultural parameters of Mitteleuropa, where its literary expression was imagined as a microcosm of the former Habsburg Empire’s supranational plurality.  However, the projected macrocosm of Trieste is not a unified image, like a globe; but instead it is a nebula – as Svevo had imagined it – where no universal idealizations could gain a foothold.  This study interrogates the image of the city as a microcosm and as a nowhere and how that relates to the macrocosm of the atopias of globalization, in order to demonstrate that Triestine writing is global literature ante litteram.  The unresolved dialectics of doing and undoing literary language and identity through the act of writing that animates Triestine literary culture plays out in globalization debates and the questions of culture that arise from it.  Triestine writing offers critical perspectives on the status of canonic literatures in a world of disappearing borders and placeless places, where the nebula is a master image for today’s world.

Keyphrases: globalization, Trieste, world literature, national language, antiliterature, Svevo, Italo, Slataper, Scipio, imaginary geography, atopia, cosmopolitics, territorialization, littérature universelle