"Whose World? The 'Worldliness' of World Literature"

This chapter explores the concept “World” as it has been articulated in the scholarship on World Literature. “Worldliness” is a slippery, multilayered notion, blurring earlier historical and geopolitical boundaries. “Whose world?” queries both nationalism and globalism, underscoring that literary culture exceeds and explodes provincial perspectives, and incorporating sociocultural flow theories such as transnationalism, diaspora, cosmopolitanism, planetarity and other non-national paradigms. At the same time, we acknowledge that the “worldliness” of World Literature is traditionally grounded on a discipline rooted in Eurocentric ideals of universal excellence and translatability, and so it evokes the great comparatist tradition of encyclopedic mastery (typically associated with the Enlightenment’s Republic of Letters and with Goethe’s Weltliteratur). As a term akin to prestige and intellectual sophistication, it is therefore simultaneously related with the production and management of cultural capital and its crucial role in local and global power dynamics. “Worldliness,” however, also refers to an experiential, pragmatic, concrete attitude, with a strong focus on the one hand on the conditions of production, circulation, and reception of literary works, and on the other hand on cultural identities, communities, and histories, while keeping in sight the singularity of individual works. Hence, World Literature contributes to an intense debate surrounding a conflict between close-readers and distant-readers (see Moretti). Our question complicates nation-based epistemes, offers alternative diachronic and synchronic cartographies (borrowing from Fernand Braudel and Immanuel Wallerstein, from Franco Moretti and Wai Chee Dimock). It also aims at challenging depoliticized globalism which, while apparently cherishes “alterity,” may mimic and catalyze neoliberal agendas of language and cultural imperialism (see Gayatri Spivak, Emily Apter, Pheng Cheah). Diachronically, World Literature readings may include the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh (c.2100 – 1200 BC) and Salman Rushdie’s postcolonial Anglophone 20th Century epic, Midnight’s Children, or the evolution of a literary genre or subgenre across time and national/language boundaries. Synchronically, American poet Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass may be read comparatively with the Spanish poems of Antonio Machado or Federico Garcia Lorca, and the literary cultures of the Harlem Renaissance may be better understood and analyzed through a Black Atlantic and diasporic perspective.