Weltliteratur really exists?

The Goethean idealization of Weltliteratur in the 19th Century did not see its both inspiringly and problematically experimental realization until the 20th Century, when the advent of the Digital Age, the mélange of ‘Digital’ with the plural ‘Humanities’, presented a perfect timing for Franco Moretti to propose, at the beginning of the 21th Century (with his ‘Conjectures’ and two supporting methodologies: ‘Distant Reading’, originated from the longue durée approach of the French Annales School, and ‘Computational Criticism’, as a stance to differentiate himself from the troublesome and paradoxical concept of ‘Digital Humanities’), a new paradigm shift. But did and does the neo-positivist ‘rationality’ finally dispel the ‘obscure cloud’ inside which the problem of Weltliteratur finds itself trapped? The tension between global and local, between heterogeneity and homogeneity, between subjective and objective, between text and meaning, between canon and non- canon, between nation and world, between center and margin, appears to remain unresolved, a situation interpreted by Sloterdijk as thin-walled immunological microspheres situated in historically active macrospheres. Could the non-deciding and non-judging Sloterdijkian color ‘grey’ be really an auspicious status? To confront the digital shift in World Literature, this study concludes, it may require not only the Lukacsean acceptance of the ‘fundamental dissonance’ presented in literature ‘without looking for a resolution’, but also the audacity to realize the singular untranslatable discrete in the plural complexity.