World Literatures in Temporal Perspective

In his article World Literatures in Temporal Perspective David Damrosch discusses the vexed problem of how to shape a literary history into definable and meaningful periods without simply projecting old Western patterns onto new ages and distant areas of the world. This problem becomes acute when one seeks to create a genuinely global literary history. Damrosch surveys some early periodizations according to patterns of infancy, growth, maturity, and decline, and discusses the often unrealized persistence of biblical and classical models in modern accounts of the literary histories of Egypt, Mesoamerica, and India

Book Reviews and Libel Proceedings

The American journal of International Law has been informed of the initiation in France of penal proceedings against the editor in chief of the European journal of International Law (EJIL), by virtue of a complaint filed by an author of a book reviewed on a Web site affiliated with the Ejll.1 We share the concerns of other professional societies regarding the potential of such litigation for chilling academic discourse. 2 We also take this opportunity to explain the practice of the AJIL concerning communications from authors who object to book reviews published in our pages, and to state our position on the important questions of academic freedom involved

The world in a 'Zeitschrift'

The relaunching of the Jahrbuch 'Komparatistik' in 2015 takes place at a time of ferment in comparative literary studies, as a discipline long focused primarily on Western Europe seeks to reconsider its position in a global landscape, and in the process to rethink the contours of European literature itself. Here I would like to discuss one new manifestation of this rethinking: the founding of the 'Journal of World Literature', which will be debuting in 2016. Published in Amsterdam by Brill, with its managing editors located in Leuven and in Göttingen, the 'JWL' represents a European initiative in comparative and world literary studies, and the journal has a global presence as well. It is overseen by an international board of editors (myself among them), and it has an association with the Institute for World Literature, a Harvard-based program supported by five dozen institutions around the world, which will be responsible for one of its quarterly issues each year. Global in outlook and outreach, the 'JWL' can equally be thought of as carrying on an originally German project: to embody the potentially vast field of comparative and world literature within the pages available in a scholarly journal. To this end, very different approaches were tried in the last quarter of the nineteenth century by two foundational journals: the 'Acta Comparationis Litterarum Universarum', published in Cluj from 1877-88 by the Transylvanian scholars Hugo Meltzl and Sámuel Brassai, and the 'Zeitschrift für vergleichende Litteraturgeschichte', founded in 1886, published in Berlin under the editorship of Max Koch. Probably the very first journals in the field – the French 'Revue de littérature comparée', for example, dates only from 1921 – these pioneering journals divided up the literary territory in very different ways. Meltzl and Brassai’s 'Acta' reflected an idealistic globalism grounded in a radical multilingualism, whereas Koch opted for a more pragmatic but markedly nationalistic conception of the field. The new 'Journal of World Literature' will need to draw on the strengths of each approach even as its editors seek to avoid the pitfalls of both