Between ‘East’ and ‘West’: Goethe’s World Literature, the Question of Nation, and the Post-National in Yoko Tawada’s novel Memoirs of a Polar Bear

Abstract

Goethe had established a literary connection between “Europe” and the “Orient” in his West-Östlicher Divan (West-East Divan). His idea of “world literature” can be reframed when it is linked by Homi K. Bhabha with the cosmopolitan: “the study of world literature might be the study of the way in which cultures recognize themselves through their projections of ‘otherness.’” The contemporary author Yoko Tawada is from East Asia and has been writing poems, prose, and plays in German and in Japanese. In her playful way of writing, she explores the interrela- tionship between “Western” and “Eastern” cultures, thereby translating them in cross-border poetics. Using the method of constellation, we examine the question of nation and the postnational in Goethe and Tawada alongside Bhabha, and propose to read Tawada’s novel Memoirs of a Polar Bear as “world literature” in light of how the transnational migrants’ perspective becomes literally difficult to place.