Wordliness, Worlds, And Worlding of Literature

2019

Literature and the World presents a broad and multifaceted introduction to world literature and globalization. The book provides a brief background and history of the field followed by a wide spectrum of exemplary readings and case studies from around the world. Amongst other aspects of World Literature, the authors look at: New approaches to digital humanities and world literature Ecologies of world literature Rethinking geography in a globalized world Translation Race and political economy Offering state of the art debates on world literature, this volume is a superb introduction to the field. Its critically thoughtful approach makes this the ideal guide for anyone approaching World Literature.

This essay examines recent work on world literature theory, with a particular focus on those theorists who treat individual texts as in dialogue with the circulations of linguistic and cultural translation. I treat world literature as the theory without an object and make the counterintuitive claim that its objectlessness makes it well suited for leaving behind antiquated modes of categorizing and canonizing so-called world texts, in order to make room for new kinds of structured thinking about the world. The essay begins with an introduction to the manifold interconnections of the new world literature, including its broad overlap with fields of globalization, translation studies, comparative literature, and postcolonialism. I position four key theorists of 21st century world literature – Emily Apter, Rebecca Walkowitz, Berthold Schoene, and David Palumbo-Liu – in oppositional pairs in order to show the underlying commonality in their thinking about the value of a literature of and for the world. My entry point into the " thinking machine " of the world literature text is the concept of the limit. Far from the commonplace understanding of limit as a limitation or boundary, I argue that understanding world literature at the limit allows literary texts and theory to be read as an event of thinking that is in-process, in-common, and incomplete, an analogue to the necessary impossibility of knowing the world. " in der beschränkung zeigt sich der meister " (" It is in the limit that the master is proven. ") Goethe I will begin with the premise that world literature does not exist. Or, more specifically, the object of world literature, much like the concordance in Jorge Borges's " Library of Babel, " cannot be located. The term itself is a stand-in for a constellation of loosely aligned fields of comparative literary studies, 1 and in its most recent iteration as the literary parallel to social/political/ economical globalization, it has become elastic to the point of transparency. 2 Indeed, world literature has, rightly or wrongly, been the bête noir of literary criticism for some time, " treated, " as Mads Rosendahl Thomsen reminds us, as " too antiquarian, too idealistic and almost void of any methodical ideas for handling what is obviously too much for any individual or group, even, to master " (5). With the exception of some vestigial efforts, that project of labeling and categorizing particular texts from national literatures into a world system of location and classification has largely been abandoned. 3 But the lingering suspicion that world literature retains much of its retrograde, neoliberal undergirding (the homogenizing of culture; the processes of globalization ; a naïve anglophilia; and conservative canon protection) has shadowed the recent emergence of a number of newly rebranded forms of world literature theory. 4 It comes as no surprise then that each of the theorist/critics that touched upon in this essay identifies themselves as operating in fields distinct from world literature; these include the following: new comparative literature, translation theory, globalization, cosmopolitanism, and postcolonialism. Despite arguments to the contrary, each of these modes of reading and mapping global systems and

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.

Transformations of the European Landscape: Encounters between the Self and the Other = Acta litteraria comparativa (Vilnius) 5 (2010-11), 2011

The original Goethean (cosmopolitan, but peripheral) notion of world literature as analogous to the capitalist world-system has become relevant to transnational comparative studies: it implies a conceptual-evaluative background and practices, media, and institutions that allow intercultural transfer, intertextual absorption of global cultural repertoires, and self-conscious production for international audiences. Since the cultural nationalism of the nineteenth century, the theoretical or poetic consciousness of world literature, its intertextual coherence, and its material networks have been “glocalized.” The literary world system is accessible through the archives of localized cultural memory and particular cognitive or linguistic perspectives, whereas centrality and peripherality are variables that depend on historical dynamics and system evolution.

Journal of World Literature, 2018

Recently, critics of world literature such as Alexander Beecroft, Eric Hayot, and Haun Saussy have argued that a multitude of possible literary worlds make up the world of world literature. Literary worlds theory provides a richer and more relativistic account of how literary production and analysis work than do similar models such as Franco Moretti's and Pascale Casanova's world literary systems. However, the theory runs into two difficulties: it downplays the socio-historical situation of the critic and the text; and it has difficulty accounting for the cross-world identity of characters and how logically inconsistent worlds access one another. To refine the theory, I modify G.E.R. Lloyd's concept of the "multidimensionality" of reality and literature. Strengthening Lloyd's concept through reference to recent work in comparative East-West philosophy, I contend that the addition of Lloyd's theory resolves the problems presented above while still allowing for a relativistic critical approach to world literature.

Postcolonial Studies, 2008

The Values of Literary Studies, ed Ronan McDonald, CUP, 2015

Four perspectives on world literature-reader, producer, text, and system The central question of the summit dialogue on world literature, which was held in Beijing, was on the relation between the universal and the local. This question implicates, that the phenomenon of world literature could be seen from a relational instead of from an essentialist perspective. Hence I would like to state that in order to understand what world literature is we have to understand it generally as a network of relations, not as a set of objects, for instance, as a set of literary texts. A central, but not the only axis of these relations, is the tension between the universal and the local. Objects we classify, while relations we discern as belonging to different types of relations. From this disparity, diverging approaches to the problem of world literature emerge. Understanding world literature as a relation allows us to comprehend its processual character. World literature does not exist, but takes place. In the following, I will try to provide a relational approach to world literature with some emphasis on the tension between the universal and the local. Such a relational approach makes it necessary to discern different focuses on the relation, in which world literature takes place. These four focuses I will discuss subsequently. My argument will be illustrated by significant examples-by Chekhov's shard reflecting the moonlight, Gombrowicz's national poets' showdown, Sartre's sad autodidact and David Damrosch's reading of Pavić's "Dictionary of the Khazars". The first and most obvious focus is the reader's perspective. Most debate on world literature is limited to it. Goethe, however, most likely did not have the reader's focus in mind, when he coined the term world literature, but rather the producer's focus. I call the producer's focus the second possible focus on world literature. What does it mean to produce world literature or literature for the (whole?) world? How can a producer of literature deal with world literature? How is he or she connected to world literature? There are, however, two more focuses on world literature. They are not held individually, but systematically, namely, by the single work of literature and by the literary system as a whole. According to Yuri Tynjanov ("On literary evolution"), 1 a work of literature simultaneously has an auto-function and a syn-function. From the perspective of auto-function, a work of art is a semantic system by itself, while from the