Why world literature: introductory dialogues

Abstract

In this issue, we acknowledge the phenomenal rise of world literature in current (Euro-American) literary studies. Although world literature as an object of study was revived in the 1990s, it was not till the last decade or so that scholars expressed such intense engagement with the issue. A number of journal special issues, anthologies, monographs, conferences, and symposia were published which widened and complicated the use of the term[1]. Alongside the definitive volumes of David Damroschs What is World Literature (2003) and How to Read World Literature (2009), which have variously focussed on the issue of translation, there have been more critical interventions regarding methodology and employment of the term, notably by Emily Apter who has questioned the possibility of communication and meaning-making through translation, by Pascale Casanova who has pointed out the importance of world publication circuits and cultural capital, by Francesca Orsini who has highlighted the question of significant geographies as opposed to marginal geographies shaping literary imagination and form, and by Franco Moretti and the Warwick Research Collective who have attempted to politicise the category of world literature through a world-systemic reading.