More than twenty years after the publication of What Is World Literature? (2003), world literature remains one of the central paradigms of comparative literary studies. Questions of circulation, translation, mobility, and the movement of texts across linguistic and national boundaries have shaped scholarship for decades and have become a recurring focus of ACLA seminars  and in comparative literature departments worldwide. Yet the question of the world itself no longer seems as straightforward as it once did.
This seminar returns to world literature through a new question: “What is the world in world literature today?” Instead of assuming that "the world" names a stable global framework, we ask how literary texts, critical debates, and comparative practices imagine, construct, negotiate, and remake worlds. What does it mean to speak of "the world" today? How might changing understandings of the world reshape the questions we ask of world literature and, more broadly, of comparative literature?
Revisiting one of the field's defining debates from the perspective of the present, this seminar explores how the concept of the world has evolved over the past two decades and what this shift might mean for the future of comparative literary studies.