reviews.indd


Book Reviews 

Casanova, Pascale. The World Republic of 
Letters. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard 
Univ. Pr., 2004. 420p. alk. paper, $35 
(ISBN: 067401345X). LC: 2004-54359. 

In geopolitical and economic matters, 
competition—and even antagonism—be-
tween nations is generally seen as an in-
evitable part of life. By contrast, the world 
of letters is often thought of as harmoni-
ous and equitable: a meritocracy that, 
by virtue of the universal and timeless 
qualities of great literature, transcends 
national borders. The awarding of the 
Nobel Prize for Literature to writers of di-
verse ethnic and national backgrounds in 
recent years (V. S. Naipaul, Gao Xingjian, 
and Kenzaburo Oe, to name a few) would 
seem to confirm this idea of the literary 
world as a genuinely international space 
in which writers of excellence receive the 
acclaim due to them. Pascale Casanova’s 
World Republic of Letters  (fi rst published 
in French in 1999 as Le république mondiale 
des letters) takes issue with this notion of a 
literary world without borders.

 Casanova’s view of literature is in-
fluenced by the mode of historical study 
known as “world systems analysis,” 
which seeks to explain the emergence 
of the modern capitalist order since the 
sixteenth century by conceptualizing 
the world as a global unit composed 
of a core of powerful, wealthy nations 
and a periphery of weak, dominated na-
tions, whose relationship to each other 
is predicated on exploitation and radical 
inequality. The literary world is divided 
into a “center” of nations with rich and 
prestigious literatures and a “periphery” 
of countries that for various reasons, 
among them, colonialism and other 
forms of political domination, have yet 
to emerge as players on the world stage. 
Due to its rich literary heritage, political 
progressivism, and hospitality to foreign 
writers, Paris is the center of the literary 
world par excellence (although Casanova 

admits that London and New 
York have been growing in im-
portance since the 1960s).

 Casanova describes Paris as 
a magnet for writers seeking to 
make a literary reputation. It is 
the city in which writers whose 
genius is not immediately rec-
ognized in their own countries find an au-
dience (Faulkner and Joyce in particular); 
a writer celebrated in Paris becomes part 
of the pantheon of universal writers. To 
be translated into French is to gain access 
to a world audience of educated readers. 
Paris has a unique power to legislate on 
literary matters and acts as a Greenwich 
Meridian of literary time in defining 
what is modern through the writings of 
its avant-garde.

 The dominance of the centers of liter-
ary power imposes a set of choices on 
writers from spaces on the periphery. 
They are faced with either assimilation 
(and for Casanova, V. S. Naipaul, on ac-
count of his literary traditionalism and 
alignment with British conservative polit-
ical values, is the arch-assimilationist) or 
aggressive differentiation, a strategy em-
ployed by writers from emerging literary 
spaces who insist on the distinctiveness 
of their branch of literature (e.g., Magical 
Realism in Latin America, which departs 
from the norms of Spanish literature in 
a radical manner). Writers whose first 
language is not one spoken at the center 
face the additional challenge of becoming 
“translated men” for whom linguistic 
compromise is a condition of reception 
in the wider world. Casanova’s account 
of the mechanics of the process of literary 
translation is extremely detailed and illu-
minates aspects of the careers of writers 
such as Ibsen, Strindberg, and Nabokov 
that are often overlooked in traditional 
literary history. 

The World Republic of Letters is un-
doubtedly a virtuoso work; Casanova 

552 



is fluent in discussion of literature on 
several continents and the range of her 
references is often astonishing. However, 
the work has some fl aws, particularly 
from the perspective of an Anglophone 
reader who may be more accustomed to 
thinking of New York and London, and to 
a lesser extent Paris, as the centers of the 
literary world. Some English-language 
authors one would expect to fi gure in 
Casanova’s account are barely mentioned 
(e.g., Joseph Conrad, who seems a para-
digmatic figure of the artist from the mar-
gins of Europe struggling with choices 
as basic as whether to write in English or 
French). Another conspicuous absence 
from Casanova’s work is any mention of 
the work of scholars engaged in projects 
similar to her own, such Franco Morett i’s 
Modern Epic: The World-System from Goethe 
to García Márquez (Verso 1996) and Atlas of 
the European Novel (Verso 1998).

 There are also some issues with the 
premises and intellectual framework of 
Casanova’s project. Her presupposition 
that the world of literature is a global unit 
would seem to be at odds with experience 
and reality, which would suggest a con-
figuration more like a Venn diagram, in 
which the various literatures of the world 
overlap in places, with a central group-
ing of writers translated into virtually all 
languages, but with most belonging to 
semiautonomous regional and linguistic 
groups. The implication of Casanova’s 
account is that the definition of success 
for a writer, from whatever part of the 
world, is acceptance by the Western lit-
erary establishment, when clearly there 
are forms of international success that do 
not involve the imprimatur of Paris (i.e., 
literary texts with wide distribution in 
non-Western languages that, for whatever 
reason, do not translate well or conform 
to the norms of Europe). 

The World Republic of Letters has al-
ready received a considerable amount 
of attention in the form of reviews and 
was even the occasion for a book-length 
collection of essays edited by Christopher 
Prendergast and Benedict Anderson, De-

Book Reviews 553 

bating World Literature (Verso 2004). One 
expects that it is likely to become required 
reading for graduate students in literary 
studies now that it is available in English 
translation. Its interest for research and 
academic librarians probably would have 
been greater if, instead of thinking about 
the ways in which politics and economics 
can supply us with metaphors for think-
ing about rivalries in the world of letters, 
more attention had been devoted to the 
actual mechanics of book fi nancing, print-
ing, and distribution (e.g., the difficulties 
faced by writers from countries without a 
developed publishing industry in finding 
an overseas publisher) and their eff ect on 
literary production.—David Mulrooney, 
Harvard University. 

Crowley, Bill. Spanning the Theory-Practice 
Divide in Library & Information Science. 
Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow, 2005. 239p. 
alk. paper, $45 (ISBN 0810851652). LC 
2004-14050. 

Bill Crowley addresses a genuine and 
complex concern in the discipline and the 
profession. In describing how little of the 
theory developed and tested by teaching 
faculty is viewed as relevant or useful by 
practitioners, Crowley makes the impor-
tant argument that “university faculty 
members and nonacademic professionals 
… exist within divergent subcultures.” 
Though they support similar profes-
sional principles and societal goals, these 
individuals participate in two relatively 
distinct organizational cultures with vary-
ing requirements. On the one hand, the 
author focuses on theory development 
and research done by teaching faculty 
and, on the other, on the downside of the 
higher education paradigm that fosters 
research and theory development, which 
lacks direct applicability to practice. 

Expanding the discussion to include 
ways in which practitioners can be in-
volved in theory development, practice-
based research done by those working in 
information organizations, and the way in 
which faculty members, including those 
who serve as consultants, can foster the