Comparative World Literature
World literature is often taken to be a uniform phenomenon, a cultural expression of the contemporary “world-system.” Yet people used to read texts from many parts of the world long before the present age of globalization, and even today world literature is constructed and used very differently in India than in the USA, and differently again in Brazil, China, and Romania. Different works are translated and assigned in courses, commonly read works are read differently, and the canon of world literature as it is formed in a given locale interacts in distinctive ways with that country’s own national and regional traditions. This seminar invites contributions that will explore examples of the creation and use of world literature around the world. Individual papers may focus on a particular country or region. This is planned as the second of three versions of this seminar (following a first meeting at ACLA 09 and preceding a third and final meeting at ICLA 2010 in Seoul). Across its three versions, the seminar will seek to develop a comparative understanding of the varieties of the world’s world literatures.