“The age of world literature is at hand, and everyone must strive to hasten its approach.” This is what Goethe famously said to Eckermann in 1827, launching the career of the term “world literature” (Eckermann 1955). The formulation contains a paradox or at least a tension that would continue to characterize world literature to this day: world literature is at hand, it is ready to be grasped, and yet we cannot quite get hold of it yet; we cannot take it and its arrival for granted. On the contrary, we, every one of us, must strive to hasten its approach. Without such striving, which is reminiscent of Faust’s most salient feature, the arrival of world literature will be delayed, perhaps indefinitely. This future-oriented temporality of world literature seems to have disappeared when Marx and Engels pick up the term just a few decades later, in 1848, in their account of the bourgeoisie. Now world literature has arrived, through a process described in one of the Communist Manifesto’s most famous paragraphs. The revolutionary effects of bourgeois capitalism are rendered in the dramatic present tense, as culminating in the arrival of world literature: “and from the numerous national and local literatures there arises a world literature” (Marx and Engels 2005). But despite the dramatic present tense, the Communist Manifesto, too, describes an ongoing process, one that has not quite played itself out yet, and the two authors speculate about its future course. In 1848, world literature is still in the process of emerging. q This essay was first presented at an Ibsen workshop at the Center for Ibsen Studies in Oslo in 2011 and further developed as a keynote address at the XIIIth International Ibsen Conference in Tromso in the summer of 2012. Participants in both events helped me significantly develop this piece, including Tore Rem, Frode Helland, Narve Fulsa us, and Lisbeth Pettersen Waerp.