Afrika im Umkreis der frühen Weltliteraturdiskussion : Goethe und Henri Grégoire

The paper deals with the notion of "world literature" and the previous European judgments on the extra-European literatures. On the contrary, with his book De la littérature des Nègres (1808) and his plans for a world literary congress to be held in Paris in 1817, his French contemporary Henri Grégoire acknowledged African authors as partners of a world literary circuit. Though Goethe himself failed to recognize Grégoire as a "literary man", the paper shows that Grégoire's great African project drew inspiration and information from some of Goethe's immediate contemporaries in Germany and other parts of Europe, thus integrating "black literature" into a proto-concept of world literature. 1. GÁLIK, Marián, « Concepts of World Literature, Comparative Literature, and a Proposal », CLCWeb - Comparative Literature and Culture : A WWWeb Journal 2, (4), 2000.