Worlding a Peripheral Literature

Abstract

The original Goethean (cosmopolitan, but peripheral) notion of world literature as analogous to the capitalist world-system has become relevant to transna-tional comparative studies: it implies a conceptual-evaluative background and practices, media, and institutions that allow intercultural transfer, intertextual absorption of global cultural repertoires, and self-conscious production for international audiences. Since the cultural nationalism of the nineteenth century, the theoretical or poetic consciousness of world literature, its intertextual coherence, and its material networks have been "glocalized." The literary world system is accessible through the archives of localized cultural memory and particular cogni-tive or linguistic perspectives, whereas centrality and peripherality are variables that depend on historical dynamics and system evolution. The recent intensity of the debate over the concept of world literature is a symptom of social and political shifts in literary studies under conditions of globalization 1. On the one hand, comparative literature is challenged by the "shrinking world" and the neo-liberal ideology of the free circulation of capital, goods, and people. On the other hand, it has to respond to postcolonial and anti-globalist emancipatory movements. Such conditions have also developed an awareness of the global mobility of cultural products, their deterritorialization, singular local appropriations, and hybridizations, and the massive variation of the same matrixes in dis-parate parts of the world. This is the reason why literature, considered as a global phenomenon, has become relevant to comparative literature.