The Genres of World Literature

Abstract

The making of a new world literature – new world literary critical discourses, new bodies of texts encompassing a broader and more diverse literary world – calls for a reevaluation of the old categories that have structured our discipline. World literature has taken full advantage of its potential to open up traditional genres, re-shuffle texts, and produce new generic formations that address specific cosmopolitan trans-interpellations whose inscription in the discursive frame of world literature depends either on their global spread or on the global aesthetic and critical questions they pose. Magical realism’s place in the imaginaries and expectations of world literature is often naturalized, and so the world literary status of the genre is usually taken for granted and left unquestioned.