Weltlitteratur

"Johann Wolfgang von Goethe introduced the concept of Weltliteratur in 1827 to describe the growing availability of texts from other nations. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels used the term in the Communist Manifesto of 1848 to describe the "cosmopolitan character" of bourgeois literary production."

"[T]oday the term "world literature" is often used to denote the supposedly very best in literature, the so-called Western canon, recent books such as David Damrosch's What Is World Literature? define world literature as a category of literary production, publication and circulation, rather than using the term evaluatively. Arguably, this is closer to the original sense of the term in Goethe and Marx."

Monomyth

A universal pattern in mythmaking was described by Joseph Campbell in his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949). Campbell borrowed the term monomyth from James Joyce's Finnegans Wake. Campbell's insight was that important myths from around the world which have survived for thousands of years, all share a fundamental structure. This fundamental structure contains a number of stages, which include:

1. a call to adventure, which the hero has to accept or decline
2. a road of trials, regarding which the hero succeeds or fails
3. achieving the goal or "boon," which often results in important self-knowledge
4. a return to the ordinary world, again as to which the hero can succeed or fail
5. application of the boon in which what the hero has gained can be used to improve the world.

Campbell wrote:
“A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.[2]”

The classic examples of the monomyth relied upon by Campbell and other scholars include the Buddha, Moses, and Christ stories, although Campbell cites many other classic myths from many cultures which rely upon this basic structure.

The Strength of the Voice

As in frame narratives, the metanarrative voice seems to speak at varying volumes at different times and in different places. In the case of the Arabian Nights, the reader is constantly aware of the narrative voice despite a complex web of narrative layers. Scheherazade's situation is one of life or death. The reader is aware that beyond the tale, there is a greater [T]ale which is more real and in a sense, more thrilling because of it's reality. And at the same time, the reader incarnates herself into the smaller frame and enjoys this aspect of the narrative also. Likewise, we may debate over the tensile strength of the Metanarrative Voice. Does the voice of, let's say, Freud ring loud enough to bring us back out of our smaller life stories again and again? Does his metanarrative effectively connect our personal narratives? What would be a fair criteria for that? I submit that his voice does penetrate and unite a wide range of stories. Will his thoughts and writing continue to hold us together through the ages? Is his metanarrative truly beyond all or is there a story which is bigger?