The Work of World Literature

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The contentious discourse around world literature tends to stress the ‘world’ in the phrase. This volume, in contrast, asks what it means to approach world literature by inflecting the question of the literary. Debates for, against, and around ‘world literature’ have brought renewed attention to the worldly aspects of the literary enterprise. Literature is studied with regard to its sociopolitical and cultural references, contexts and conditions of production, circulation, distribution, and translation. But what becomes of the literary when one speaks of world literature? Responding to Derek Attridge’s theory of how literature ‘works’, the contributions in this volume explore in diverse ways and with attention to a variety of literary practices what it might mean to speak of ‘the work of world literature’. The volume shows how attention to literariness complicates the ethical and political conundrums at the centre of debates about world literature.

In this volume:

Derek Attridge on the work of translation

Lorna Burns on world literature and postcolonialism

Francesco Giusti on gestural community

Benjamin Lewis Robinson on the world without literature

Rashmi Varma on extractivism and indigeneity

Dirk Wiemann on a literary ethics of commitment

Jarad Zimbler on world literary criticism

With an afterword by Emil Apter