Jacob presented research on Paul Celan and world literature at the National Taiwan University Foreign Literatures lecture series in December 2024.
Abstract
The concept of ‘world’ in world literature has been variously reconstructed, in terms of scale and scope, but also in terms of its historical content. Understood as the global space of literary production and consumption, or as the site for an idealised projection of human unity, the ‘world’ of world literature is distinctly material and immaterial, and literature, in that conceptual frame, a distinctly real and ideal object at the same time. This paper centres on the late poetry of Paul Celan as both embodying and presenting a challenge to this distinction. Focused on Celan’s late poetry, the 1969 Jerusalem poems, the paper explores a conception of world not as a phenomenally rich historical terrain, nor as an ideal horizon for understanding literature, but as a difficult space of exile. Celan’s poetry has often been read through Martin Heidegger’s philosophical vocabulary, and Heidegger’s world rich phenomenology frames recent attempts to understand literary ‘worlding’ a critique against modern ‘worldlessness’. But I argue here that it is precisely as ‘worldless’ that any world structure appears, in Celan’s work: that the phenomenon of literature, as worldly, appears in its closure. Writing from Jerusalem to Paris, writing towards Jerusalem as a historical horizon, writing through colonial wars, Celan’s poetry conceives world as appearing exilically, as, as he puts it, ‘fort’ – ‘elsewhere’, ‘gone’. Reading from Celan and Heidegger out to world literature and Emmanuel Wallerstein’s conception of the world-system as bracketed between the revolutions of 1789 and 1968, this paper reads the phenomenon of world closure as a structure for understanding the peculiar, limited, divergent phenomenality of ‘literature’ in the world.