Читать книгу World Literature, World Culture - Группа авторов - Страница 27

In conclusion, we may say that Andrés’ historiographic proposals are unique, especially in relation to the dialectic established between classical and “national” European literatures. His solution, as an heir to the historiography of the Enlightenment – albeit one who in many respects departed radically from its precepts – is not an attempt to define world literature as a category by eliding the differences between the various contributions to it, but rather to present these different contributions through the prism of rationality, which leads him to consider the classical literatures not as immovable models or closed realities but as important elements in the history of all literature, and to view the contributions of the Islamic world in the same light. In this sense, reading Juan Andrés undoubtedly helps us to understand the problems that still haunt the history of classical literatures, and to see how we might fruitfully advance towards a new form of literary history that could be equally applied to all the literatures of antiquity.