The work of world literature : introduction
The contentious discourse around world literature tends to stress the 'world' in the phrase. This volume, in contrast, asks what it means to approach world literature by inflecting the question of the literary. Debates for, against, and around 'world...
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The contentious discourse around world literature tends to stress the 'world' in the phrase. This volume, in contrast, asks what it means to approach world literature by inflecting the question of the literary. Debates for, against, and around 'world literature' have brought renewed attention to the worldly aspects of the literary enterprise. Literature is studied with regard to its sociopolitical and cultural references, contexts and conditions of production, circulation, distribution, and translation. But what becomes of the literary when one speaks of world literature? Responding to Derek Attridge's theory of how literature 'works', the contributions in this volume explore in diverse ways and with attention to a variety of literary practices what it might mean to speak of 'the work of world literature'. The volume shows how attention to literariness complicates the ethical and political conundrums at the centre of debates about world literature.
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The world after fiction : J. M. Coetzee's "The Childhood of Jesus"
Opponents of World Literature fear that its advent marks the end of the 'work of literature'. J. M. Coetzee's "The Childhood of Jesus" (2013) presents a world in which the work of literature has indeed been forgotten. Migrants arrive in a new life...
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Opponents of World Literature fear that its advent marks the end of the 'work of literature'. J. M. Coetzee's "The Childhood of Jesus" (2013) presents a world in which the work of literature has indeed been forgotten. Migrants arrive in a new life 'washed clean' of the burden of the European tradition. Simón, who dimly recalls the old life, feels that something is missing in the new. He longs for something altogether 'other'. Might Simón learn from the exceptional child David to perceive the 'likeness' in this world? Are we to read Coetzee's novel like Simón or like David - and with what consequence for our understanding of the work of literature in a time of World Literature?
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