Douwe Fokkema and World Literature Studies

In the discussion of world literature in international academic circles, scholars usually quote the works and views of American scholars like Franco Moretti and David Damrosch, but they seem to ignore the contributions made by such a European scholar as Douwe Fokkema, who had before them been dabbling in world literature issues. In fact, as early as the 1980s, Fokkema had already published a number of articles, covering a wide range of world literature issues, and was involved in the discussion of literary canon formation and reformation and other relevant issues. Because of his early training in Sinology and later attainments in Western literary theory, Fokkema broke away from Western-centrism when he began his comparative literature studies, consciously carrying out cross-cultural comparative studies of literature. His involvement with world literature began with a study of postmodern literature, in which he not only invited Chinese and other non-Western scholars to write chapters in the volume on postmodernism edited by himself and Hans Berten as one volume of The Comparative History of Literature in European Languages, but, in his later years, he devoted himself to the study of contemporary Chinese postmodern literature and published an essay on the subject, thus viewing postmodernism as an international trend of thought in world literature and art. In addition, he also dabbled in the construction of a new cosmopolitanism with the times, and reconstructed cosmopolitan elements from China's Confucianism as a reference. All the above constitute his cross-cultural theoretical contributions to the study of world literature.