Orientalism and the Institution of World Literatures

Abstract

What Is World Literature? In the current revival of the concept of world literature, something of considerable importance appears to be largely missing: the question of Orientalism. Despite the reputation of Edward Said’s Orientalism as a sort of foundational text for concern with cultural relations on a planetary scale, the specifics of that book’s conceptual armature or the archive with which it engages do not seem to play a significant role in this renewed discussion and intensification of interest in the effort to comprehend literature as a planet wide reality. This is the case for instance with Pascale Casanova’s The World Republic of Letters, which presents an argument about the emergence of international literary space in Europe in the early modern era and its expansion across the continent and beyond over the last four centuries.1 The overall armature of the book rests on the identification of three key moments in the development of this international literary space and seems to follow fairly closely the chronology established by Benedict Anderson in Imagined Communities. The first, its moment of origin, so to speak, is the extended and uneven process of vernacularization in the emerging European states from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries. The next turning point and period of massive expansion comes, she argues, again following Anderson’s periodization, in the “philological-lexigraphic revolution” starting in the late eighteenth century and the widely dispersed invention