Ben Etherington gave a lecture on world literature as a speculative totality at the Heyman Center, Columbia University (29 January 2019), where he is currently an Edward W. Said Fellow.
Titled ‘Critical Humanism and Speculative Literary Totalities’, Etherington’s paper considered how the totality of verbal arts (“world literature”) risks being separated into brute data and incommensurable particulars. To understand the unity which recent developments have rent apart his paper revisited the tradition of critical humanist scholarship dedicated to thinking literary totality. First, he briefly glossed three critical humanist keywords that have afforded speculative means for conceiving of literary totality through philology and interpretation: ‘historical poetics,’ ‘Ansatzpunkt,’ and ‘contrapuntal reading.’ (The discussion of the latter term drawing on research undertaken in the Edward W. Said archive.) Each of these reading practices, Etherington argued, arose from particular historical exigencies and were distinct responses to different phases of global imperialism. Second, Etherington offered a contribution to this store of keywords by developing the notion of the ‘literary meridian,’ a term adapted from Paul Celan, to think about the ways in which lines of connection pass through otherwise unconnected and localised literary practices. The final part of the paper was a speculation on meridian lines connecting the storytelling practices of three writers working within the current imperial conjuncture: Alexis Wright, Alai, and Patrick Chamoiseau. The paper claimed that in our day world literature is necessarily localist and localizing: ‘a universal enriched by every particular: the deepening and coexistence of all particulars’ (Aimé Césaire).