The Global Novel: Comparative Perspectives Introduction

World literature and world history have conjoined histories in Western and non-Western contexts and are now enjoying a comeback in the international academy. They share theoretical ground and objectives, have comparable trajectories of formation worldwide, and tend to attract a host of detractors similarly sceptical of 'generalists' and 'wishful encyclopaedists'. Although world literature and world history have developed slightly different models in Europe and the US, both fields, in their most general definitions, call to widen the cultural scope of study beyond national paradigms and revise the foundational civilisational narratives of the human collective.

American Literary History, 2011

A full-text version of this article apepars in the Brandeis University Institutional Repository: http://bir.brandeis.edu/bitstream/handle/10192/27252/IrrArticle2011.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y Here is an extract: Since at least the late 1980s, ambitious writers have been imagining a new kind of narrative called the global, planetary, international, or simply “world” novel, and in recent years, their visions have started to come to fruition. Paralleling the much-remarked phenomena of accelerated migration and increased interpenetration of global markets, this new genre of the novel is changing the face of twenty-first-century US literature. Most importantly, the world novel is beginning to make global conditions newly legible to American readers. For some readers, this world or worldly novel replaces the Holy Grail of an earlier generation—the so-called great American novel.1 Yet several features thought to characterize the world novel also seem to derive from the earlier form: namely, multistranded narration, broad geographical reach, cosmopolitan ethics, multilingual sensitivity, and a renewed commitment to realism.2 With the possible exception of multilingualism, all of these features could also describe Dos Passos's Depression-era U.S.A., for example, as well as characterizing recent novels celebrated for their worldliness, such as Junot Díaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) or Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun (2006). Recognizing this continuity in form, a number of critics have …

This essay uses a comparative reading of two novels, Jan Potocki's Manuscrit Trouvé à Saragosse (Manuscript Found in Saragossa, 1804–15) and Charles Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), to investigate the methodologies of comparative and world literature studies. Although these novels were written around the same time and are strikingly similar, critical reflections on their commonality have been limited to passing comments noting their resemblance. Examining ways in which a comparative reading could proceed, the article demonstrates how the historicist interpretive strategies typically mobilized in discussions of works from non-major traditions, coupled with dominant theories of the development of the novel, serve to occlude the formal innovations of both texts. Attending to their complex work of worlding yields new critical insights, revealing how these works anticipate literary techniques associated with globalization. This suggests, more broadly, a need for a more robust formalism in world literature studies, particularly in discussions of works from non-major traditions.

World Literature in Theory, 2014

A critical survey of the various concepts of world literature in the past and the present, and argues for a more inclusive view of major literary traditions and their canonical works as part of world literature.

World Literature Today, 2024

Review-article of THE OXFORD HANDBOOK OF THE LATIN AMERICAN NOVEL, vis-à-vis "world literature."

New Literary History, 2009

he challenges entailed in writing a global literary history are threefold, involving problems of definition, design, and purpose. Can the field of inquiry be defined in such a way that a meaningful history can be conceived at all? If so, could an effective organization and a manageable plan of work be devised to give concrete shape to a project of global scope? Finally, and hardest of all, could a history of world literature be written that anyone would actually want to read? In the following pages, I will seek to reach affirmative answers to these questions.

2018

A draft version of the paper which has been published in "The International Journal of Literary Humanities" (volume 12, 2014). The version lacks the footnotes and the proofreading made later by the journal editors. Theh needed to be removed here because of the copyrights. The article concerns the complex interrelation between the literary theory and the diversified phenomena of globalization in its both cultural and socio-economical terms.