MC: Stefan Helgesson: World Literature 3.0: The Current State of the Field

World Literature 3.0: The Current State of the Field

If early German articulations of Weltliteratur – Goethe’s most famously – count as a beginning, the flurry of debates precipitated by Pascale Casanova’s, Franco Moretti’s and David Damrosch’s interventions around the year 2000 introduced a significantly new set of approaches. This moment could be called world literature 2.0. Today, arguably, we are witnessing the emergence of world literature 3.0 involving a diversification of methods, a maturation of attitudes, and, ultimately, new ways of conceptualising the object(s) of literary studies. The aim of this master class is to present and assess some recent such examples of ”doing” world literature. Ranging from distant approaches dealing with systems and typologies of literature, to close attention to texts, locations and individuals, world literature studies now present us with a number of innovative methods that lead far beyond the contraints of methodological nationalism.

Readings:

Ahmed, Siraj. ”Notes from Babel: Toward a Colonial History of Comparative Literature”, Critical Inquiry 39 (2013): 296-326.

Beecroft, Alexander. ”World Literature Without a Hyphen”, New Left Review 54 (2008): 87-100.

Cheah, Pheng. ”World Against Globe: Toward a Normative Conception of World Literature”, New Literary History 45.3 (2014): 303-329.

Helgesson, Stefan. ”The Cosmopolitan and Vernacular in Interaction”, in Helgesson et al. (ed.), World Literatures: Exploring the Cosmopolitan-Vernacular Exchange, 1-11. Stockholm: Stockholm UP, 2018.

Neumann, Birgit and Gabriele Rippl, ”Anglophone World Literatures: Introduction”, Anglia 135.1 (2017): 1-20.

// Stefan Helgesson, Stockholm University