World Literature, by Any Other Name?

Abstract

There is a “World” of Difference Between the Benign Descriptive Tautology of the Phrase World Literature When it is Used to indicate, with its phenomenological innocence, literature from a variety of sites and in various languages and the same phrase when it is used to indicate a unitary mode. I distinguish between these concepts by placing quotation marks around the phrase when the second sense is meant. “World literature” indeed results from an act of ideological and hegemonic production: it is a tendentious, normative category with all the magisterial and juridical authority of a taxonomic rubric. In a classic Althusserian sense, the phrase, in quotation marks, actively interpellates the world and the world responds to the ideological hail. In so doing the world constitutes itself epistemologically as certain and determinate. The hail privileges and exemplifies a particular configuration of the world, inevitably alienating and “othering” the possibility of infinite alternative configurations and constellations as various and protean as the world itself. The crucial difference is that until the moment of the hail, world literature just “was,” doing its thing expressively, speaking profusely and in polyglot chaos and richness without necessarily speaking for itself in a unitary, prescriptive, representational, and representative mode. To put it simply, every literature in the world was in the world, and this fact needed no reiteration, no self-conscious validation. Where else would anything or any literature be except in the world? Why not just let world literature be in its various sites, languages, and configurations?