World Literature Today: From the Old World to the Whole World

Abstract

No shift in literary studies over past generation has been greater than opening up of canon from a focus on a relatively restricted core of masterpieces to expansive multicultural landscape so evident today. The tremendous widening of our literary horizons, in turn, is nowhere more evident than in field of literature, which until recently usually meant Western European literature, but which now seems to encompass everything from earliest Sumerian poetry to most recent fictional experiments of Tibetan postmodernists Zhaxi Dawa and Jamyang Norbu. Wholly laudable in principle, this rapid expansion poses exceptional difficulties in practice. Just how is this great wealth of material to be made accessible to readers? What classic texts will have to be dropped in order to make room for new arrivals within physical and temporal boundaries of courses and anthologies? What cultural context needs to be provided - and what cultural context can feasibly be provided -for non-specialists to have meaningful encounters with African orature, Japanese renga, and Mozarabic kharjas? How are all these works to be read alongside Petrarch and Wallace Stevens, always assuming that both of these latter authors still remain on syllabus? The fact is that these questions have yet to be answered in any satisfactory way, as a look at several recent anthologies will show. These problems are not actually new: expansion of canon only brings into sharp relief a number of tensions that have long existed within idea of literature as it has been formulated over course of past century. We won't do better in presenting newly expansive of until we do a better job of clarifying just what we mean to accomplish by presenting the literature of the world for a contemporary American audience. I will begin, then, by discussing some earlier efforts to create anthologies of