Rewording the World or Reworlding the Word? Some Postcolonial Perspectives on the “World” of World Literature

Abstract

There appears to be no consensus as yet on the meaning of the term “world” in “world literature”. Over the last few years, “world” has indeed been the object of a multitude of responses and readings, which markedly vary according to researchers’ academic backgrounds and theoretical vantage points. How then is the “world” of “world literature” to be apprehended? Combining linguistics-informed and close-reading methods, the present essay seeks to shed light on a notional issue that has especially divided world and postcolonial literary scholars in recent times. More precisely, it will be argued that “world” in the phrase “world literature” has begun to undergo a linguistic process of re-semanticization, whereby this lexical item has come to encode, and be imbued with, values central to the postcolonial agenda – thus providing the postcolonial cause with fresh impetus in the twenty-first century.

Keywords:

• “world”
• linguistics
• postcolonialism
• re-semanticization
• world literature

Acknowledgements

I am profoundly grateful to Daria Tunca for her unflagging support and shrewd comments on earlier versions of this essay. The present essay has greatly benefited from David Damrosch’s input as well, together with the valuable feedback provided by the editor of Interventions, Robert J. C. Young, and by the two anonymous referees. I give my warmest thanks to them all.

Notes

1 Literary scholars wrote on Weltliteratur – though more sporadically – in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including postcolonialists (e.g. Said 1984; Bhabha 2004, 16–18). I am not concerned here with the genealogy of the concept. Oft-quoted texts authored by thinkers such as Goethe himself, Georg Brandes, and Rabindranath Tagore, will accordingly not be covered. I prefer to look into the manner in which “world (literature)” as a term has been understood by the researchers who, in a sense, have institutionalized world literature as a far-reaching field of inquiry in the 2000s.

2 In this essay, emphasis is laid on the resurfacing of world literature within the present-day Euro-American academy. Furthermore, as I have chosen to carry out a stylistic analysis of “world” as a member of the locution “world literature”, I did not include in my corpus Pascale Casanova’s The World Republic of Letters (2004), inasmuch as the author opted for another phrase: the French “République mondiale des Lettres”. Due to space constraints, elaboration on the latter term has to be deferred for another occasion.

3 Damrosch’s use of the preposition “into” in his (2003) account of world literature is judged to be revealing of the comparatist’s theoretical position (see Cheah 2014, 309; 2016, 29). Cheah based his claim on Damrosch’s assertion that “a work enters into world literature by a double process: first by being read as literature; second by circulating out into a broader world beyond its linguistic and cultural point of origin” (Damrosch 2003, 6; quoted in Cheah 2016, 29, Cheah’s italics). “Into”, Cheah maintained, suggests here both “motion” and “transformation”, conveying subtly the two pivotal ideas that underpin the Damroschian approach to world literature (2016, 29).

4 Admittedly, one may cite the noun phrase “‘the literature’ of ‘the world’” (Damrosch 2000, 7), in which the preposition “of” bridges the semantic gap between “(the) world” and “(the) literature”. Nevertheless, what both nouns and their definite articles – cautiously framed by inverted commas – signify is not plainly stated.

5 Moretti’s (2000) and Casanova’s (2004) musings on the topic subtend WReC’s hyphenated world-literature (2015, 6–10), which will be touched upon in the following section of the present essay.

6 For another perspective on the limitations of postcolonialism in twenty-first-century literary studies and on how it can be complemented by world literature as a paradigm, see Thomsen (2008, esp. 21–25). For a specific outlook on how postcolonial thinking, in turn, may inflect the world novel, Ganguly’s work is worthy of note (2016, e.g. 110–131, 177–178).

7 “‘Normativity’”, Cheah spelt out, “refers to what ought to be. We conventionally understand norms and their related cognate, values, as ideals that practical reason prescriptively projects onto reality to transform it in the image of human ends or as principles immanent to collective human existence that will unfold and actualize themselves. The force of a norm comes from its universal validity. A norm with universal force can move human agents to worldly action. The normative force of world literature refers to its power or efficacy to change the world according to a normative ethicopolitical horizon” (2016, 6).

8 Cheah, in tune with philosophical phenomenology, opines that “literature does not merely map the spatialized world and give it value and meaning”; instead, “its formal structures enact the opening of a world by the giving and coming of time” (Cheah and Damrosch 2019, 308). To be fair, time – yet a notion with a non-phenomenological slant in this instance – is not at all overlooked in Damroschian world literature and even goes hand in hand with space (e.g. 2003, 97, 135, 140, 148, 149, 164, 168, 218, 276–277, 281; see also Cheah and Damrosch 2019).