Contextualizing World Literature

This book revisits the notion of World Literature and its applications in Comparative Literature. It suggests the notion not as a means to sift out international paradigms for reading literatures, but as a set of guidelines for the construction of interlocking and/or reciprocally illuminating multilingual literary clusters. These ensembles are of very diverse shapes : the world, a region, a country, a language block, a network of cross-cultural "interferences" – while the so-called minor literatures invite to question the use of these ensembles. Within this frame, fourteen essays respond to the basic paradox of World Literature : how may specific methodological and critical outlooks allow expression of the universal ? The answers to this question can be arranged in three groups : 1. Recognition of the need to break loose from European or Western critical perspectives ; 2. Presentation of macro- and microcosmic dimensions connectedness and its processes ; 3. Definitions of the methodological efforts and hermeneutic orientations to be applied.