The Limits of World Literature

Holmes, Chris

doi:10.1111/lic3.12338

Cited by 3 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 14 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Relationality, rather than totality, takes center stage in these readings. Christopher Holmes calls this “thinking with, rather than of, the world” (, n.p.). Cheah calls this “world‐making” (, p. 2), and perhaps not surprisingly, the writers he discusses – Michelle Cliff, Amitav Ghosh, Nuruddin Farah, Ninotchka Rosca, and Timothy Mo – exemplify what Jed Esty and Colleen Lye call “the lively fate of realism in the peripheries of the 20th‐century literary world‐system” (, p. 269).…”

Section: World Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

The Contemporary

Hyde

Wasserman

2017

Literature Compass

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

If "the contemporary" is the heading under which scholars study recent literary, artistic, and cultural forms, what exactly is it? Is it a period? A style? A type of contentnetworks, finance, or climate changethat feels diagnostic of the present? For literary scholars, the contemporary is a persistently moving target. Rather than stating when it is, we consider critical methods of reading the contemporary alongside the objects they favor and promote. We thereby disrupt the idea of an accepted canon of contemporary fiction by showing the wide array of texts contemporary critics do in fact study. This survey covers contemporary approaches to fiction that find their starting points in the neoliberal economy, in systems and institutions, in theories of the Anthropocene and world literature, and in critical race studies. We conclude with the proliferating "posts" of contemporary literature and theorypost-human, post-racial, and even post-postmodernand with our intuitions about the temporal and historical function of literary form in contemporary fiction.

show abstract

Section: World Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

The Contemporary

Hyde

Wasserman

2017

Literature Compass

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

Opaque Poetics in Salvador Plascencia’s The People of Paper

Riach

2021

Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This article reads Salvador Plascencia's The People of Paper (2005) in dialogue with Édouard Glissant's concept of 'opacity', an ethical and aesthetic stance that finds value in impeding comprehension. This novel's opacity arises from various complicating mechanisms -translational, intersubjective, formal, and intertextual -which both invite and inhibit interpretation, and in so doing open up a space in which readers can think with the text. Bringing The People of Paper andGlissant's thought together shows how Plascencia's text thickens and complicates readerly engagement, and so enriches the ethical and aesthetic purchase of the novel. Conversely, Plascencia's innovative use of the page and his invocation of an intertextual history of such innovation expands the scope of Glissant's theory, by using the physical medium of the book and the workings of genre history as components of an opaque poetics.

show abstract

World Literature and the Italian Literary Canon: From Elena Ferrante to Natalia Ginzburg

Caserta

2019

Modern Languages Open

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Variously intended as a field of study, a paradigm, and/or a method of literary criticism, World Literature has in the last two decades become a central subject in literary studies. The current debate around World Literature is certainly central to the present and the future of the discipline of Comparative Literature. At the same time, as I show in this paper, a redefinition of World Literature, which would include a deeper understanding of both its risks and its potential benefits, can push us towards a revision of the canon(s) of our national literary traditions. Moving from Tim Park's assertion that the popularity of Elena Ferrante's "dull global novel" would contribute to obscuring more deserving authors-among whom he cites Natalia Ginzburg-this paper argues that Ferrante's literary success could, on the contrary, pave the way for a rediscovery of past writers within the Italian literary tradition. Through a comparison of Ferrante's L'Amica Geniale and Ginzburg's La Strada che Va in Città, the article shows how both works are, in Pheng Cheah's terms, "literature that worlds and makes a world", insofar as they foreground a world that is open and unstable, crucially caught between tradition and modernity, as well as the local and the global. Ultimately, both works call for a conception of World Literature that does not need to imply the loss of the local, but that can rather promote what Florian Mussgnug calls "responsible and responsive local sensitivity". Introduction: What Literature? And what World? World literature can hardly be considered a new concept in literary criticism. The numerous recent scholarly discussions of world literature, and the multiple attempts at theorizing it from different perspectives, invariably link it back to Goethe's inaugural appraisal of Weltliteratur (1827) and to the equally celebratory remarks on the internationalization of literature that can be found in Marx and Engels' Communist Manifesto (1848). And yet, it is impossible to deny that since the turn of the millennium, world literature, variously intended as a field of study, a paradigm, and/or a method of literary criticism, has become a central subject in literary studies. Seminal works by Franco Moretti (2000), David Damrosch (2003), and Pascale Caserta: World Literature and the Italian Literary Canon Art. 18, page 2 of 18 Casanova (2004), in particular, have laid the foundations for what has now become a fertile area of scholarly inquiry and research. 1 Seen as a timely response to economic and cultural globalization, and as such praised as an attempt on the part of literary studies to cope with the global development of human and social sciences, world literature seems to be ideal for advocating literature's place and utility in the contemporary globalized world. 2 But how so? In its proclaimed worldliness, world literature argues at its outset for a significant widening of traditional literary boundaries and aims at including in its scope all the literature in the world. 3 Such an ambitious gesture has not been exem...

show abstract

The Limits of World Literature

Cited by 3 publications

References 14 publications

The Contemporary

The Contemporary

Opaque Poetics in Salvador Plascencia’s The People of Paper

World Literature and the Italian Literary Canon: From Elena Ferrante to Natalia Ginzburg

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About