World literature, a decentred sphere

Jorge Acero Portilla

doi:10.25100/nc.v0i25.8193

Abstract

Franco Moretti and Pascale Casanova’s accounts of world literature are coded in metaphors. The former employs a core-periphery system to examine the unequal relationships between national literatures; the latter sees world literature as a ‘world literature of letters’, wherein the exchanges between literary traditions take place following economic patterns. This essay discusses to what extent these metaphors are inadequate to analyse the current trends of world literature as they portray the so-called central literatures as unidirectional forces that inform the canon, thereby shaping the literary production. This perspective privileges an economical jargon which constitutes an ideological bias resulting in the homogenisation of the literary value. This article takes a different approach by offering an alternative metaphor to explain world literature and its dynamics. This metaphor is a decentred sphere without a circumference. In order to illustrate this point, William Ospina’s El año del verano que nunca llegó (2015) is analysed, focusing on its worldly elements.

Highlights

In his brief essay “The Pascal’s Sphere” (1997), Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges suggests that “[p]erhaps the universal history is the history of a handful of metaphors”1 (14)
First employed by Hermes Trismegistus, this metaphor described God as “an intelligible sphere whose centre is everywhere and its circumference nowhere” (16). Borges notes that this geometric figure lost its theological aura following the secularisation posed by the Copernican astrology that displaced God’s creation and, by the same token, God himself, from the centre of the universe
As I suggested above, world literature is an elusive term whose problematic definition has occupied a number of theorists in the rise of the current century since Franco Moretti’s Conjectures on world literature (2000) brought the concept into discussion

Summary

Introduction

In his brief essay “The Pascal’s Sphere” (1997), Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges suggests that “[p]erhaps the universal history is the history of a handful of metaphors” (14). As I suggested above, world literature is an elusive term whose problematic definition has occupied a number of theorists in the rise of the current century since Franco Moretti’s Conjectures on world literature (2000) brought the concept into discussion This notion can be traced back to Eckermann’s account of his conversations with Goethe (1850), who coined the term Weltliteratur. It is worth noting that the economic-based jargon pervades Moretti’s description of the system as he makes use of terms such as importing the novel, foreign debt, direct and indirect loans Advancing this tendency of employing economic phraseology, Pascale Casanova (2004) describes literature as a map or literary republic based on a ‘market’ in which writers compete against each other to gain recognition.This is, according to her, what gives life to international literature. Abandoning this binary model is just one of the steps towards a more comprehensive understanding of world literature.We need to rethink and redefine its notions, actors and concepts, jettisoning the ideologically charged terminology associated with the economic sphere

Reinvention of a vocabulary for world literature

El año del verano que nunca llegó