The project of a History of European Literature has never been more urgent and never more problematic. Urgent, in the sense that should one aspire to an effective European unity that is not simply based on crass economic advantages or perceived short term benefits, a sense of how one may configure a European identity, in all its different shadings, obviously imposes itself as an imperative; and literature has always been a privileged means for articulating identity across time and space. Problematic, because at least since the 2005 French and Dutch negative referenda on the issue of a possible European constitution or ‘basic law’, the forces attempting to disrupt the process of European unity with a harking back to xenophobic forms of nationalism have been rampant; and to many the very notion of a European identity to be expressed in a History of European Literature might seem suspect. Let it be clear that in my view, the sense of urgency is right and, if anything, the problems some might see in such an attempt are more of a reason to strive for accomplishing a task that has clear societal and even political implications beyond its usefulness for all engaged with cultural affairs.

There are always several problems involved in the writing of literary history, and on could even say that, at present, although the task is by no means impossible, it has become more difficult given the competing goals and agendas of diverse groups. A solution, as in recent examples of literary histories of the United States or of Germany, has been to accept diversity and competing claims and, instead of pretending to present a unified and detached perspective from above, to allow for different perspectives and even conflicting views to coexist so as to allow readers to directly engage with those issues. Rather than assume such seeming lack of a unified judgement as a flaw, the editors of the Columbia Literary History of the United States, for instance, openly proclaim it as an asset: ‘In view of the changes in theory and method, even the meanings of terms of the title are different from those of earlier literary histories of the United States’ (Ref. Reference Elliott2, p. xix). More than a decade later, and confronted with a task made all the more difficult as there is no such thing, nor will there come to be in the near future, as a United States of Europe, editing and writing a Literary History of Europe demands not only critical attention to the very terms of the title but, furthermore, to specific issues concerning subsequent theoretical developments and the rather different scope of the project. For, while the editors of the Columbia Literary History of the United States did have to struggle openly with the definition of what that term, ‘United States’, might mean in a historical process reaching back far before the actual constitution of the federative state so designated, the editors of a Literary History of Europe have to do so twice over. This, in light of the fact that much of European literature was produced centuries before a notion of a possibly ‘united’ Europe was even formed; and also because of the fact that, in spite of the rapid developments of the European Union towards a sort of federative state, this stage has not yet been reached and, indeed, even nowadays a great part of what one considers ‘Europe’ falls outside of the European Union.

In many ways, then, the first task facing anyone contemplating the project of writing a literary history of Europe is precisely how to navigate this double bind. In a sense, this is what the editors and contributors of the recent volume Literature for Europe? do. In many respects, both the essays included in that volume as well as the methodological questioning guiding them show a great awareness of this problem and other problems directly related to it, such as the ambivalent nature of the relation between literature and national identity, the need to preserve diversity, and the gamut of political implications a literary history of Europe brings with it. As Theo D'haen, in his capacity as co-editor lucidly exclaims: ‘It should also be clear, though, that any such “European Literature” cannot be subservient to an “imperial Europe”. Hence, there can be no such thing as “a” European literary history’ (Ref. Reference D'haen and Goerlandt3, p. 8). However, the richness and topicality of that volume notwithstanding, if one is to produce any version of European literary history, still other problems arise, some of which are already adumbrated in the concern of avoiding mirroring the notion of Imperial Europe and preserving diversity, but which I think need to be explored further. A fundamental problem, in my view, has to do with what model of literary relations one has in mind. For a long time one has become accustomed to perceiving the relations between different authors and indeed between different literatures as an agonistic process. Without wanting to deny the important effects that competitiveness might have in intertextual relations, I find that recent discussions of literary relations as a form of acute struggle, bordering on war, is not only wrong but prejudicial for any attempt to write a history of European literature. Closely tied to such a model are two interlinked notions: one, that literature is best organized along national criteria; the other, that necessarily there are great and minor literatures, just as there are great and minor nations or states. Not only should one avoid a simplistic and fallacious transposition of socio-political categories and assumptions to the realm of literature, but their hindrance of a proper understanding of European literatures needs to be exposed if one is to aim at all at a (more) cosmopolitan History of European Literature.

Both departing from, and continuing, her points on the broader question of world literature, initially raised in La république mondiale des lettres,Reference Casanova⁴ Pascale Casanova presents an argument for what she terms ‘Combative Literatures’ in a recent essayReference Casanova⁵ that promises to argue for a ‘literary internationalism in Mauss's sense, which allows for nationalist belief both to be taken into account and to be superseded in a relational and universal conception of world literature’ (Ref. Reference Casanova5, p. 134). As if one could have one's cake and eat it too when it comes to literature, Casanova offers both to rescue the notion of nationalism and to supersede it, while setting up a model of literary relations that would be unabashedly ‘combative’:

Although Casanova's erudition and wide references generally allow for a compelling reading, even if one is at odds with the argument, in this recent case the reader might be at pains to find any excuse for the decidedly central European perspective – one is tempted to say French, even if France is presented as one of the great nations now in decline, but the author takes care to mention Kafka and Beckett as examples – that still aims at exceeding itself by claiming a vague transnational and cosmopolitan aura. It is not only the strange appeal to Marcel Mauss, Benedict Anderson, Herder, Renan, and even Fredric Jameson's highly polemic and widely rejected notion that all ‘third world’ literatures are basically national allegories that I object so much too, but rather the very premise from which Casanova builds her model of combative literatures: the assumption that the category of the ‘national’ must be at the base of literary relations. Certainly, the claims of a post-national era are premature; but to insist on a ‘resurrection’ of the national paradigm is both hollow – as it never died and so does not need to be brought back to life – and, ultimately, reactionary. Even if that is not the intention, and I certainly hope it is not, Casanova's model of ‘combative’ literatures, in spite of its claim to transnationalism, ends up aligning itself too neatly with current political trends to abandon a European project and revert to old claims of national allegiance.

I fully agree with Casanova's statement on the inexorable link between literature and politics that she anchors in Kafka, and am prepared to accept that in many cases one can indeed see literature primarily engaged in what is a very political articulation and identification of national characteristics and values. One has but to recall the pioneering work of Doris Sommer in Foundational Fictions,Reference Sommer⁶ showcasing how 19th-century literature in Latin America constructed alternate models for the developing nations in the wake of independence. But I cannot accept that this necessarily means that the basis for literature is such a national engagement; nor can I accept the way in which Casanova marshals authors around in an attempt to prove her point, thereby falling into what I would consider serious misreadings of those authors. For instance, to mention Beckett and link him with the emergence of national spaces seems to me not only odd but also misguided. Surely, even though the modern state of the Republic of Ireland might be said to have been emerging at around the time Beckett was a student at Trinity, and that, indeed, his writing bears distinctive elements of a struggle with the condition of being Irish, to claim a direct link between Beckett as a writer and the emergence of the Republic of Ireland does not hold water. Not only is the discussion of Irish qualities, in the sense Casanova means it, specifically in competition with English ones, something that predates 1922 by much, but Beckett, if anything, should be seen precisely as one of those writers that problematize and question the validity of classifying European literature under national tags.

Were the discussion to be confined to the 19th century, perhaps the case for combative literatures might still hold some sway. For Casanova, this is nowhere more evident than in the case of the United States: ‘The founding period of American literature can hardly be understood without taking into account the explicit rivalry of American authors towards their British counterparts, and their desire to assert a literary independence and self-sufficiency in relation to what had been, up to that point, an unsurpassable British superiority’ (Ref. Reference Casanova5, p. 128). This sounds convincing at first sight, and obviously in a situation where a country is asserting its independence one can find many examples of ‘rivalry’, as Casanova puts it. But I find such a view not only simplistic, as it ignores the fact that American authors were not only in dialogue with English counterparts, but with French and German ones as well, but likewise ignoring much of the revisionary work done on the literary history of the United States over the past two decades.

One does not even have to take as radical a view as that of Daniel B. Shea that ‘American literature begins with the first human perception of the American landscape expressed and preserved in language’ (Ref. Reference Shea7, p. 6), to realize that long before 1776 there was an American literature. Likewise, it does not follow that by extolling the virtues of America as a nation, someone like Whitman would be combating England. And it is interesting that Casanova has nothing to say about the fundamental influence Poe had on Baudelaire and, via this route, on European literary modernity. To proclaim that ‘[i]t was as if, at the moment of entering the international arena, Americans had set themselves the explicit goal of dethroning the English’ (Ref. Reference Casanova5, p. 128) simply does not hold. It is symptomatic of the weakness of her argument that Casanova first singles out Melville as an example of her views, then admits of his intense engagement with Shakespeare – while she leaves out Camões, another important influence on Melville – but only to conclude, erroneously, that such an engagement ‘gives an idea of the actual dependence of American writers at the moment at which they proclaimed their emancipation’ (Ref. Reference Casanova5, p. 128).

Such a view of a would-be paradoxical American dependence is misguided in much the same way as Casanova's other views, and especially her model of ‘combative literatures’. But referring at this point to the issue of ‘dependence’ helps at least to understand how she might have reached such a conclusion, as behind her seemingly timely reaching back to nationalism in a time of a more global view of literature, is the need to come up with a competing model. Towards the conclusion of her essay Casanova sets up a list of binary oppositions which, in her reading, were used to classify literatures and nations, from Kafka's ‘“great” and “small”‘ and T.S. Eliot's ‘“mature” and “immature” literatures’, to Deleuze and Guattari's ‘distinction between what they call “minor” and “major” literatures’, including Franco Moretti's use of Immanuel Wallersteins’ notion of central, peripheral, and semi-peripheral, and culminating in her own ‘distinction between dominant and dominated literatures, or between autonomous and heteronymous ones’ from her book, The World Republic of Letters, now to be improved to: ‘On consideration, however, perhaps the most important opposition is between combative literatures and pacified or non-engaged ones’ (Ref. Reference Casanova5, p. 133). It is, as if not satisfied with piling up a series of previous binary oppositions, and with conflating the political with the literary, mixing in nation and literature in a way those to whom she refers do not do, Casanova had decided that before anyone would come and successfully challenge and replace her own binary classification, she would do it herself, updating somewhat the polemic notion of dominant and dominated literatures with an improved version that borrows from the rhetoric of war our society has been steeped in over the last decade. Indeed, the opposition between ‘combative’ and ‘pacified’ literatures can be seen as proof of Casanova's own need for being ‘combative’ and dethroning the models offered by previous scholars. As a model for the understanding of European literature or for the writing of a literary history of Europe, such an ‘improved’ model, or indeed, her previous one, is historically myopic, intellectually flawed, and utterly inapplicable.

Perhaps the very first step anyone aiming at writing a history, or ‘histories’, of European literature, must take is to discard the category of the national. Not because of any utopian notion of a post-national era that supposedly would already be upon us, but because, for the greater span of time that category simply had not been invented yet, and because even during its advent it never was just the only or the primary means of identification for writers who always understood themselves in international terms. Keeping the category of the national as a primary means for categorizing European literatures would mean either ignoring all of ancient Greek and Roman literature, supposedly the very cradle of Europe, and then also probably most if not all of medieval and renaissance literature(s) as well. One can of course work retroactively and try to establish the ‘national’ antecedents for present-day literatures. Yet, even in the case of a country that has remained to a great extent confined to its original borders and enjoys great cohesiveness such as Portugal, this is not so simple, as a great majority of medieval texts were written in Latin, or in Castillian, and even towards the end of the Renaissance Portuguese – and in fact writers in general in the Iberian Peninsula – used and mixed languages as they saw fit. If one were to talk about Spanish or French or German or English literature the same questions arise, even further complicated by the complex political changes that have occurred throughout the centuries in these, and other, countries that have emerged out of the agglomeration of several distinct nations. And when one considers Eastern Europe, the almost continual changes to national borders did not stop at the end of the 19th century but continued well after the Second World War, and indeed even as recently as a few years ago. But it is not only the political redrawing of national maps that makes the organization of literature according to the category of the ‘national’ a senseless exercise. If one turns to language, for instance, many other questions also arise, and I would like to mention just a few examples, all drawn from modern and contemporary European literatures to illustrate what I mean.

If one thinks about French literature, for example, the biggest issue along these lines is the insidious yet very visible split between Francophone and French literature. Writers from former French colonies claim, to my mind, rightly, to be counted as part of French literature rather than of the highly dubious and politically suspect category of francophone literature. That this split does not hold becomes evident, I think, the moment one considers the case of a prominent writer such as Assia Djébar, both an Algerian writer and a member of the Académie Française. Anyone ignoring her extensive and influential work when thinking about contemporary French literature would be plainly misinformed. Or take the Belgian writer Amélie Nothomb. Born in Japan, and raised for the most part in a variety of Asian countries, Nothomb's more than 20 novels to date are very much a part of French literature no matter what might be her personal identity. Or take the Nobel Prize recipient of 2008, J.M. G. LeClézio, who has claimed his double citizenship, French and Mauritian, most notably as a response to the pronouncements on the centrality of European literature made by the Swedish Academy's permanent secretary, Horace Engdahl.

Turning to the English realm, one could mention a number of authors who equally disrupt any simple notion of what ‘English’ literature is. Next to the already mentioned Beckett, and Joyce, and Yeats, and many other Irish writers who wrote in English, or even Americans such as T.S. Eliot, or indeed Eastern European writers such as Joseph Conrad, one can also mention contemporary writers in English that likewise do not fit the simple pattern of ‘English’ literature. Take Salman Rushdie for example. To say that he is an Indian-British writer is only one way of making it clear that there is no simple ‘national’ category possible, and if one looks at the subject matter of his novels, greatly focused on India or even, as in the case of The Moor's Last Sigh,Reference Rushdie⁸ on the historical connections between India and the Iberian Peninsula, there is also no simple way of defining them as ‘English’ and yet of course they must be seen, as they are, as some of the most prominent instances of contemporary English literature. Let us also consider a younger writer, Zadie Smith for instance, in whose work a similar hybrid identity is central, and not just between Jamaica and England, but also between those two nations and the United States where she now lives and which furnished a key element of her highly successful novel On Beauty.Reference Smith⁹ Or, if one prefers, one could also invoke the example of Tim Parks, certainly one of England's successful novelists, who lives in Italy, and indeed also writes about Italy, yet has addressed precisely the questions confronting Great Britain's multicultural society in Judge Savage.Reference Parks¹⁰ It would be highly surprising were anyone to refer to him as an Italian writer, or to Smith as an American, or to Rushdie as an Indian writer, With all of their multiple allegiances and interests they reflect important facets of contemporary ‘English’ society and literature without any possibility of being simply pinned down with a national label.

Kafka is one of the writers singled out by Casanova in her attempt to mount a binary opposition between literatures, and she draws on the work of Deleuze and Guattari in trying to then move on to the issue of minor literatures, something to which I will return. For the moment, I want to comment on the fact that I think the way Casanova presents Kafka is misleading because it is too simplistic, especially in the conflation between literature and nation. But the reference to the intriguing and highly influential work of Deleuze and Guattari only serves to make such a confusion worse. This is because it keeps what one could term a flaw in their argument – the somewhat too free play with the historical circumstances of KafkaReference Corngold¹¹ – without any of the brilliance. Kafka is precisely an example of the difficulty of organizing literatures according to simple ‘national’ categories. No one will doubt that his is one of the greatest names in German literature, yet he was not German. As Nicholas Boyle lucidly notes at the beginning of his German Literature: A Very Short Introduction, ‘[w]hat is called German literature is really three separate literatures, of three separate states, as distinct as the literatures of, say, England, America, and Australia’ (Ref. Reference Boyle12, p. 3). And he continues that ‘ to call Kafka a German novelist is rather like calling Seamus Heaney a British poet: there is some truth in the phrase, but only because it points to a tension between the writer's origins and material, on the one hand, and his medium and his public, on the other’ (Ref. Reference Boyle12, p. 4). What this fine and thoughtful methodological preoccupation reveals in the end, though, is not so much that Kafka is not a German writer – he simultaneously is and is not – but rather the shortcomings of any division of literature along national lines. Kafka, for all his origins outside the modern state of Germany – Boyle's focus – has indelibly and irreversibly changed what one thinks of as German literature, even the German language. And the same could be said of course of a number of other highly influential writers in the canon of modern German literature such as Paul Celan or Ingeborg Bachmann. Writing about the latter in A New History of German Literature, Mark M. Anderson notes:

Coming closer to the present, one could look at the growth and importance of German-Turkish literature, with Emine Segvi Özdamar's Mutterzunge,Reference Özdamar¹⁴ as yet another element contradicting simple national classifications of European literatures. And, to round off this brief list, one could refer to Téa Obreht's best-selling novel The Tiger's Wife,Reference Obreht¹⁵ winner of the Orange prize for fiction in 2011. Obreht was born in Belgrade but moved with her family to Cyprus, and Egypt, before settling in the United States when she was 12. One could rightly classify her novel as part of American literature, perhaps even in a subfield of ethnic or immigrant literature. However, the events the novel deals with, in spite of all of its magical realist details, are squarely rooted in the wars that tore Yugoslavia apart in the 1990s, a subject matter that approximates it rather to European literature. Indeed, even if none of the events or places are directly named, and even though Obreht herself was not a witness to the destruction of Yugoslavia, her novel engages directly with a particularly painful and very recent aspect of a European conflict as Liesl Schillinger notes in her review in The New York Times:

Obviously, an American writer can write a novel entirely focused on European issues without this making his or her work necessarily a part of European literature. That is also not my point. Rather, what Téa Obreht's novel so well demonstrates is that the category of the ‘national’ is neither simple nor the most appropriate to understand literary works. The Tiger's Wife is both an American and a European novel depending on what aspect one wishes to stress and it can be seen as partaking both of a process of European cultural memory and of an American attempt at making sense of European conflicts.

As Theo D'haen notes, ‘the input of the view of the outsider, say the “postcolonial” view, on Europe's literary history is of crucial importance …’ (Ref. Reference D'haen and Goerlandt3, p. 8). Perhaps one can even go further: not only is such a perspective important but one should also consider how much of ‘postcolonial’ literature must be seen as a constitutive part of European literature beyond simply reflecting on Europe. Using the examples already mentioned for instance, I think that few would object to the consideration of the work of a Salman Rushdie, or Assia Djébar or Emine Özdamar as both within the field of European literature and as being postcolonial. And many other examples could be mentioned of course. The way in which some writers explore postcolonial issues within Europe should even lead one to consider the notion of Europe as a postcolonial space in itself. In terms of the writing of a literary history of Europe this can have significant consequences. Because rather than stick to a categorization of European literature based on national units, looking at the new, ‘postcolonial’ texts being published in Europe would open up the possibility of understanding Europe in a different and more cosmopolitan light. That is, I would plead not so much for an inclusion of the view from the postcolonial outside as a sort of corrective to European literary history, but rather to an inclusion of the postcolonial view as a view very much from the inside that nonetheless does not allow for entropy. Or, to borrow Derrida's comment, at the end of The Other Heading, on his own intellectual position, one could thus feel oneself at once as European but not only: ‘I am European, I am no doubt a European intellectual […] But I am not, nor do I feel, European in every part […] If, to conclude, I declared that I feel European among other things, would this be, in this very declaration, to be more or less European? Both, no doubt. Let the consequences be drawn from this’ (Ref. Reference Derrida17, pp. 82–83, emphasis in original).

One consequence easily drawn out from Derrida's statement could be the refusal to think of European literature as a zero-sum game with insiders and outsiders clearly delineated along the questionable borders of the nation-state. Or indeed, one could also go so far as to refuse any validity to the series of binary oppositions conveniently recalled by Casanova as antecedents to her own such division, and to reject one of these especially, that is to say the division between minor and major literatures. For one, this is because its grounding in the reflections on Kafka suggested by Deleuze and Guattari is itself questionable. By making Kafka all by himself into a ‘minor literature’ Deleuze and Guattari were paying homage, even if in a peculiar way, to the greatness of Kafka. However, wanting to extrapolate from that and apply the distinction to ‘national’ literatures seems to be a vacuous exercise, more dependent on the economic or political success at a given time of a set of states than reflective of the relative greatness or lack thereof of any particular literature. Granted, some literatures as a whole have been more influential than others and this is a fact obviously relevant for the writing of literary history. Nonetheless, the way in which this sort of value judgment more often than not is used tends to leave out any historical consideration and to focus exclusively on the modern period. If one were to look at Greek literature for instance, one would have to consider it as one of the most influential in a European context. But clearly, a sharp distinction is made between the greatness of Ancient Greek literature and the peripheral role accorded to modern Greek literature. As Gregory Jusdanis remarks, using one of the pillars of comparative studies, Ernst Curtius’ European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages Reference Curtius¹⁸ and its claim of unity for European literature, as a point of departure: ‘Curtius no doubt includes classical Greece in his Procrustean scheme but not the literature of the modern nation’ (Ref. Reference Jusdanis19, p. 4). Or, as he had previously remarked in the ‘Introduction’ to a special issue of the Journal of Modern Greek Studies dedicated to the question of the minor and the peripheral, ‘[a]s a minor subject (in both senses of the term) modern Greek studies has until recently been co-opted either in the celebration of ethnic diversity or in the translation of a still exotic culture to a western readership’ (Ref. Reference Jusdanis20, p. 2).

Has anything really changed in the intervening two decades? Has the perception of modern Greek literature as something other than exotic made it through into a larger European consciousness? If the populist cries for an abandonment of Greece in its current financial struggles is any indication I am afraid not. And the same could be said of other European literatures equally misperceived as minor even if not quite as exotic, from the Dutch to the Swedish, the Portuguese to the Romanian. One possible way out of such a confining and reductive situation would involve not only a change in perception, but a massive effort at bridging language barriers and political pettiness. Theo D'haen's suggestions for instance of reshaping national literature departments into European literature departments, or of promoting translation in a wide scale are valid and concrete possibilities even if difficult to implement, as he also is well aware that: ‘… a European policy of active promotion of wide-scale translation, and open access to electronic resources, is indispensable. This would make for equal access to all literatures in all languages of the European Union, and beyond, and hence for an “open” canon of European literature’ (Ref. Reference D'haen and Goerlandt3, p. 7). Difficult, but not impossible and not even merely utopian. What would be required, though, would be the political will to make some move towards a concrete cultural Europeanization, and not the vague statements, meant to avoid infringing on anyone's susceptibilities, that seem still to be the hallmark of European policy papers. The 2008 EU Report on ‘Promoting the Teaching of European Literature’, for instance, is such a document: it appears to foster a decidedly forward-thinking stand (though concluding with an appallingly sexist note, in which the new Europe is presented as ‘Princess Europa, a desirable young woman’), calling for wider knowledge and translation of all European literatures, yet still wanting to preserve the national as a primary category and to keep holding on to the opposition between major and minor literatures.Reference Legendre²¹

There can be no doubt that European literature, in historical context but also at the present, is a cosmopolitan field made up of many strands of national, regional, and individual voices in more or less direct contact with each other. Attempts to still classify these myriad voices along simply national lines, or in terms of binary oppositions, should be seen as outdated and doomed to failure or inconsequence. It can only be hoped that the writing of a new literary history of Europe would not only preserve but highlight this cosmopolitan force. If anything, I would like to echo Ottmar Ette when he states that ‘Europe, it seems to me, cannot be adequately understood if one does not take it to be in movement (Bade), while at the same time being a movement […]. In this view, Europe emerges as a concept without fixed territorial dimension. It also stands for a space of movements in which people cross borders and borders cross people in ever-new configurations’ (Ref. Reference Ette22, p. 125, emphasis in original). Obviously, such border crossing is often painful and can lead to a shattering of identities, or even to death and immense suffering. One would do well to remember Habermas’ notion that if there is a common core of European identity it is grounded in suffering, lest one be simply too euphoric about such movements. Nonetheless, it is indeed imperative to embrace a view of Europe as something unfinished, perhaps impossible to ever fully achieve, because it is in constant renewal, and to stress the role of literature in such a process. As Habermas also stated, ‘[i]t is the lasting memory of nationalist excess and moral abyss that lends to our present commitments the quality of a peculiar achievement’ (Ref. Reference Habermas23, p. 21). Building on that memory should enable us to move towards a (more) cosmopolitan view of European literature.