The Ethics of World Literature

Abstract

The paradigm of an ethics of world literature is merely an extension of the deep and varied explication of ethics and literature. Philosophy after the Second World War had not expunged ethics but found it much more problematic. The possibility of an ethics of world literature is primarily short-circuited by what concept of world is operative in that formulation. The geometric accentuates a creative tension between a desire for a methodology of ethics and our often unsystematic emotions. The ethics of cosmopolitanism has been vigorously debated, and more intensively so since the advent of globalization. The disjunctive appeal between world literature and globalization appears to exist in the binary of cultural and economic value. The worldliness of capital accumulation is a false universal because the general equivalence it promotes pivots on extraction, primarily from the value of labor power.