Ahhhhh! I just wrote a long, well thought out post, but my penis is broken and it somehow cause a total deletion!
Inev, I think maybe people are misinterpreting your question: of course you know there are libraries in Cambodia and bookstores in Japan, and it's sort of unnecessary for people to conclude that you didn't know this if they've read your posts at all.
You ask if there is literature in other places and other languages. That is an important question - we have to stop and think about what literature is here before we answer this one too swiftly with a "well duh, there's lots of books in other languages" type answer!
What literature is and how it's determined derives from Western theoretical practices - a piece of literature isn't just "a book" or "story" - the concept of a piece of writing being a work of literature derives from the hierarchical practice of determining a text's "value" and if it meets certain standards. This practice draws from various philosophers and theorists like Plato, Aristotle, Marx and right through to current critical theory and practice. While the act of making art is global and there's probably not a culture known that doesn't make some form of art, there isn't a substantial body of theory and analysis of art outside the Western one. The literary canon (i.e. that nonspecific ever-changing set of books that are the "greatest" or "most important") is traditionally made up of works by dead while men (as I think you're trying to allude to with your question) because the analysis of artistic aesthetic draws from a history that is primarily Western. When it comes to the French, they're part of Western culture and plenty of their writers are part of the literary canon: think Les Miserables, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Cyrano de Bergerac, or even L'Étranger (oh! The Stranger by Albert Camus! Read it!)- these stories are parallel to those written in English because they draw from the same system of valuation. Certain cultures value different works more or less depending on their own preferences: American scholars value Mark Twain more than the English do, some Canadian literary theorists worship Margaret Atwood while plenty of people outside Canada have no idea who she is. If you look at the actual work - you can read a book you've never heard of before by and author you've never heard of either and know if it's literature or not after having read enough books that you know are literature because all books within the category follow a certain set of standard aesthetic values.
If you turn to a non-Western country though, especially with work created before the country had been influenced by the West, the same parallels aren't there because the art was created outside of literary tradition - i.e. outside of Western tradition. This is not to say a piece of writing from before Western contact was made isn't "good" but that the valuation system we draw from doesn't work for it. Did a guy visiting Japan in 1918 have the right to see a Japanese Noh play and dismiss it as without merit because it didn't fit into the Aristotilian model of how a play should be structured? No, but it happened back then, it happened sixty years ago, and it even happens now. The scholarly measure of aesthetic value inescapably draws from a Western view of the world because that's where the study and theory was born and flourished. So if you're really asking "is there literature outside of the English language, then yes - there is. If what you're really asking is whether literature exists outside of the Western world, the answer is yes too, but only to the extent that the Westernized view of what makes good writting has spread to the point that non-Western artists regularly work toward creating work within a Western aesthetic frame work. Beyond that however, there is a large body of artists outside the Western world and even within it who work or have worked toward aesthetics outside this frame work, and it is only in the late 20th century and into this century that critics and theorists have really come to terms with the concept of aesthetic value existing outside the structure of the long history of Western theory and criticism. So, as far as I'm concerned "literature" as a concept and creative practice is Western - no matter who makes it, what country they're in and for what audience simply because the aesthetic draws from that framework.
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Topic: Literature that is Not in English. (Read 5890 times)