世界文學或「世界化」文學

World Literature or Literature as Worlding Project

在歐美學界，文學研究正在經歷一場寧靜的改革運動，這篇文章將回顧並整理這些改變，並嘗試探討這場革命對於臺灣英美文學研究者的影響與個人啟發。這篇文章分成四個部分，在第一部分中，我試圖理解比較文學或者美國文化研究為何需要轉向「世界文學」或「跨國研究」以解決學門面對的危機；在第二部分中，我則回到後殖民理論，試圖釐清後殖民學者提出「世界性」、「世界文學」、或者「星球存有」等與「世界」或「跨國」相關的論述時，他們的「世界想像」為何，藉此說明文學實為他們所倡議的「聚合聯繫」的底層結構；接著，我在第三部分則呼應與延伸史畢娃克（Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak）有關文學的「雙重包袱」的命題，提出所謂的「雙重包袱」適足以說明跨國研究或者世界文學所欲捕捉或趨近的「不共普同」之觀點。在論文的最後一部分，我則解讀兩部（非）成長小說的修辭結構，試圖轉譯這些矛盾無解的修辭形構為具有創造「該來而未來」的「世界」的具體文學行動。這篇論文主張，當今的文學研究的世界化，無非是文學研究企圖在勾勒世界的未知與未然之際，所不得不採取的反身自我的姿態，而作為美學的展演與想像的操練，宏觀精讀的閱讀方法或可因而讀出文本之言外之意，召喚出應然而未然的世界想像。

Literary study is undergoing a silent revolution, with its objectives, subjects, approaches being challenged and redefined. This article, in four different sections, reviews and assesses these changes to evaluate the impacts they have made on the literary studies in Taiwan. In Section one, I try to comprehend the recent turn taken by American comparatists and Americanists towards either World Literature or Transnationalism as an effort simply to resolve disciplinary crises. In Section two, I review the propositions made by postcolonial scholars, specifically Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, and Gayatri Spivak, as they embraced or proposed such concepts as worldliness, the ＂worldly,＂ the ＂planetary＂ in an attempt to flesh out their collective desire to put into practice an ethical vision of the aporetic ＂yet-to-come.＂ With this notion of the ＂yet-to-come＂ in mind, I then analyze, in the final section, the ambivalence embedded within the rhetorical structure of two contemporary novels of (un)growth to substantiate my argument that the recent turn towards ＂world literature＂ is about conjuring a world that is yet-to-come, uncertain and hesitant as it is, through a ＂worlding＂ project in the sense defined by Spivak. Less canon-making than a practice of close reading, the ＂worlding＂ of literary studies demands us to read, translate, and retranscribe those difficult moments in the text closely and attentively so that, through this encounter with the ＂double-bind＂ in which aesthetics and politics are trapped, we may come to recognize ourselves otherwise, while bring into presence a newness of the world.