Global literary refractions: Reading Pascale Casanova's The World Republic of Letters in the post-Cold War era

Abstract

This article critically examines Pascale Casanova's recent theorization of the world literary space from the point of view of postcolonial and especially post-Cold War debates on global literary comparativism. It investigates whether her Bourdieu-derived ‘field’ approach, with its overwhelming conceptual dependence on ‘market’ and ‘nation’ metaphors, equips her to make valid qualitative judgements on vast swathes of ‘non-European’ and ‘transnational’ literary spaces. In annexing all literatures of the non-European, postcolonial world to a historiography of European literatures, Casanova's book, this article argues, is not well positioned to theorize contemporary forms of literary ‘worldling’ where Europe is but one node among many others and scarcely the ‘Greenwich Meridian’ of literary taste. Finally, the article discusses alternative ways of studying world literary spaces and histories that have emerged in recent years, especially in the works of David Damrosch and Franco Moretti. In the process, it also weaves in aspects of a post-1989 Anglophone world literature project the theoretical and geopolitical assumptions of which are in quite some tension with those of Casanova's book.