Puchner,Martin.The Written World: The Power of Stories to Shape People,History,and Civilization.

3 The author of this book review is also the book’s Chinese translator.

In the increasingly thriving field of world literature,Martin Puchner has yielded milestone contributions,including the recently reprinted six-volume

Norton Anthology of World Literature

and years of online and offline world literature teaching at Harvard and beyond.Now he combines and crystallizes his scholarly expertise and pedagogical experience into this reader-friendly volume on people,stories,and texts that have shaped what we know (and do not know) as the canon of world literature.

The Written World

is at the same time the“written”version of his lectures and discussions with students at Harvard and throughout the world and a readable introduction to the most up-todate overview of the academic field.The book reveals that“world literature”is not convoluted jargon or a discipline inaccessible to people outside the field of literary studies;nor is the teaching of“world literature”exclusive to privileged students at institutions like Harvard.Not only is world literature accessible to all,it is in fact an integral and indispensable part of our history and daily life.

As the first gesture toward connecting with the reader,the book opens with an episode that everyone,especially those in the Englishspeaking world,cannot be more familiar with: the mission of Apollo 8.Puchner minutely recounts the moment when the astronauts read verses from Genesis of the Bible and when such readings were transmitted live through radio to the audience who were closely following the mission on the ground.He then goes on to explain the various consequences of this unprecedented“book reading”in world politics and history,demonstrating that texts (not necessarily literature in the sense we understand it) have long been entangled in and with the world we live in and have influenced its shaping in ways that we may not be aware of.This episode also strategically introduces two important concepts that sit at the core of the entire book:“foundational texts”and writing technology.The former is the subject of the book defined by Puchner as“texts that accrued power and significance over time until they became source codes for entire cultures,telling people where they came from and how they should live their lives,”such as the Bible.As he tells the stories of these foundational texts,Puchner keeps track of the (r)evolutions of the technologies by which the texts are written in relation to the rise and fall of peoples,civilizations,and histories.

The first foundational text that Puchner writes about is none other than the Homeric epic,the

Iliad

.However,instead of the usual context that the text is introduced and discussed in,namely the great Ancient Greek tradition,this time we get to read about arguably the

Iliad

’s most famous reader: Alexander the Great.Puchner brilliantly brings together the life story of,in his own words,the“larger-than-life”king and the dramatic stories of the Greek heroes in Homer’s telling as he believes that Alexander the reader once made sense of his own life trajectory by reenacting those of Homer’s characters.Even if the chapter had ended there,Puchner would have already fulfilled his mission of exposing the intersection of literature and history.But he takes a step further and tells us how Alexander,an ardent and perhaps a bit obsessive reader,would go on to shape the future world with his own literary merits.Alexander made three major contributions: 1) he brought the Greek alphabets to Asia Minor;2) he became a popular figure like the Homeric heroes in various literary texts such as the Persian

Book of Kings

;3) he built one of the most ancient libraries in the world: the Library of Alexandria in Egypt.Meticulously laying out Alexander’s contributions to literature,Puchner once again conveys to us that the book is not just about the history of world literature and the interaction of history and literature,but also in particular about the formation and transmission of words or texts in the largest sense possible and the evolution and revolution of writing institution,and technologies,without which such formation and transmission would not be possible.In the following chapter,Puchner travels back in time to a period much less familiar to the reader,but which witnessed the birth of the earliest piece of world literature that we have so far discovered,that is,the

Epic of Gilgamesh

.Unlike the widely known Homeric epic,this one,originally written in the cuneiform script,might be a more interesting text to readers outside the English world.This is where Puchner,through his superb storytelling skills and charismatic writing style,brings the supposedly distant world of literature to the reader who otherwise would not come into contact with a text from 1200 BCE and written in a dead language.The

Epic of Gilgamesh

is by no means the only uncommon text that the reader encounters in the book.In fact,it might be one of the more common choices,as

Gilgamesh

has been more and more frequently featured in the syllabus of humanities courses,at least across institutions in the US.When Puchner takes the reader to South America and introduces the Maya people’s creation myth the

Popol Vuh

(Chapter 8),or to West Africa where the great

Epic of Sunjata

has been orally passed down through generations (Chapter 14),the reader begins to see a whole“world”of literature unfolding beyond imagination. I was lucky enough to have studied under an innovative professor as part of a required English foundation class during my undergraduate studies in the US but learned that it is not a common selection.The book also features many more familiar friends besides the Homeric epics,among which

One Thousand and One Nights

(Chapter 6) probably needs the least introduction;

Don Quixote

(Chapter 9) and Goethe (Chapter 11) quickly ring a bell to those who have had some exposure to the world of literature.However,Puchner manages to rekindle our interest in these old friends through new approaches.After having been exposed to stories from

One Thousand and One Nights

our entire lives,have you ever wondered how the individual stories came to form the current corpus? Have you ever thought of the connection between seafaring pirates and literary pirates in relation to

Don Quixote

? And then comes the great German writer Goethe—did you know he invented the term that inspired an entire new category of literature and the very book you are reading at the moment? No matter if the chapter features an old friend or a new friend,Puchner never lets you get bored with one exciting and informative story after another.The scope of this book offers just a glimpse into the ambitious project that Puchner completed a few years: editing the

Norton Anthology of World Literature

.While primarily trained in the Anglo-European traditions,being a world literature scholar demands him to tap into many foreign terrains outside his immediate research and teaching areas.Puchner rises to the challenge and completes the task beautifully—in the company of respective experts for the

Norton Anthology

,while this time alone.After warming up with the relatively better-known stories of the Buddha and Confucius,the book takes up an East Asian text that sits very much at the core of world literature’s current landscape,that is,

The Tale of Genji

.What distinguishes Puchner’s writing from others on this famous text is not so much his reading of the text itself but his interest in the material aspect of the text as well as the author Murasaki Shikibu’s life.Again,this is without surprise—Puchner knows too well that the significance of the text would not be fully grasped without understanding the personal and political contexts.Furthermore,because the text itself consists of countless moments of writing—letter,poetry,etc.— it is the perfect moment to explore how the formation of a foundational text intersects with the advancement of writing technology.Similarly,Puchner tackles the Soviet poets and their writing (Chapter 13) with these topics in mind: how does one write and make use of“alternative”writing methods/technologies in extreme circumstances?

I probably should not have waited till the end to mention that Puchner is not only an extremely knowledgeable and brilliant scholar but also a highly humorous and genial writer.He does not hesitate to share his embarrassing travel encounters and laugh about them with the reader.For example,you would not want to miss his“road trips”in the Caribbean (Chapter 15),or his interactions with local people at the world literature festival in Jaipur,India (Chapter 16).

The Written World

is a book for anyone and everyone—no matter if you are a scholar in literary studies,a curious reader interested in (world) literature,or simply someone looking for a great and fun book to read next.You will not be disappointed.