Ecologies of literature

Abstract

This chapter presents two different things, namely the impossible dream of world literature, and the heterogeneous, contradictory reality of world literature. It begins by discussing the circulation paradigm of world literature. Vernacular literature is constrained by the reach of its language, but has the potential to penetrate much deeper into a particular speech community. In national ecologies, cosmopolitan sources are obscured and the vernacular canon is streamlined to fit the narrative of national emergence. Pheng Cheah sees an “analogy between world literature and the circulation of commodities in a global market,” which implies that world literature simply “reflects and is conditioned by the global character of political economy”. Alexander Beecroft’s ecological view of literature is governed by a logic of scarcity and cost-benefit calculations. Literature in a cosmopolitan language, by contrast, can reach widely but thinly. Written literature is by definition constrained not just by language but by the reach of literacy within that particular script.