The Work of World Literature

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.

Contenu
The Work of World Literature: Introduction / Francesco Giusti and Benjamin Lewis Robinson Untranslatability and the Challenge of World Literature: A South African Example / Derek Attridge World Literature and the Problem of Postcolonialism: Aesthetics and Dissent / Lorna Burns Transcontextual Gestures: A Lyric Approach to the World of Literature / Francesco Giusti The World after Fiction: J. M. Coetzee's The Childhood of Jesus / Benjamin Lewis Robinson Extracting Indigeneity: Revaluing the Work of World Literature in These Times / Rashmi Varma Being Taught Something World-Sized: 'The Detainee's Tale as told to Ali Smith' and the Work of World Literature / Dirk Wiemann Working Conditions: World Literary Criticism and the Material of Arvind Krishna Mehrotra / Jarad Zimbler Afterword: Towards a Theory of Reparative Translation / Emily Apter