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The dimensionality of world literature

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Abstract

The concept of “world literature” subordinates literature to space. Both a critique of the spatial presuppositions involved in accounts of the “world” offered by world-literature studies and an endorsement of the resistance to spatial determination common to much imaginative literature suggest that this subordination should be controversial.

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Notes

  1. Lao She (1957), cited from Nieh (1981), pp. 50–51. On the passage in relation to Lao She’s development, see Veg (2009, p. 65). On Lao She’s views of “world literature” and “ethnic characteristics” generally, see Sun (1999).

  2. For an instance of such minimization, see Zhang (1997, pp. 129–136).

  3. Pollock (2006).

  4. Ricci (2011).

  5. The Eastern origins of Aesop’s fables were no mystery to La Fontaine, who credited some of them to “Pilpai” (i.e., Bidpai); on nineteenth-century attempts to untangle the transmission history, see Thompson (1946, pp. 376–378). See also Olivelle (2002), and Ghazoul (1996).

  6. Galland (2004, Vol. 1, p. 93).

  7. But see Perec (2000) for a thorough exploration, with negative fantasy, of a determinedly banal space.

  8. Cf. Yu (1986).

  9. See Davidson (2001, pp. 183–198). Davidson rejects relativism for conceptual schemes for the same reason that I endorse it for literary worlds—being a philosopher, he has trouble accepting more than one world, and of course the humanist will have to join him in the one world once all the causal gaps have been closed up between sub-atomic particles and the whole of human history. Meanwhile, we have plurality and literature.

References

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Comparative Literature, University of Chicago, 1050 East 59th Street, Chicago, IL, 60637, USA

    Haun Saussy

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Saussy, H. The dimensionality of world literature. Neohelicon 38, 289–294 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11059-011-0097-6

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