Universal Localities The Languages of World Literature

The volume features the work of leading scholars from the US, UK, Germany, China, Spain, and Russia and presents an important contribution to current debates on world literature. The contributions discuss various facets of the historically changing role and status of language in the construction of notions of universality and locality, of difference, foreignness, and openness; they explore the relationship between world literature and bilingualism, supranational languages, dialects, and linguistic inbetweenness. They also examine the larger social and political stakes behind both foundational and more recent attempts to articulate ideas of world literature. Mapping the space between philology, anthropology, and ecohumanities, the essays in this volume approach world literature with sophisticated methodological toolkits and open up new opportunities for engaging with this important discursive framework.

Acknowledgements.- Contributors.- Preface.- Part I.- Toward a Global Philology.- World Literature – Theory – Translation: Considerations on a Fraught Relationship.- World Literature in China: Aspiration, Anxiety and Some Theoretical Questions.- Part II.- Arabic, American and/or World Literature: Kahlil Gibran’s Bilingualism and the Problem of Reception.- The Translational Movement of the Anglophone Gibran into Arabic, or “Arabization.- J.M. Coetzee as Latin American Writer: Simultaneous Translation – Foreignness – World Literature.- Other Americas, Other Immigrants: “World Memory” and “World Literature” in Maryse Condé’s Desirada.- Translating Endangered Nonhuman Worlds.- Part III.- How and What Does a Universal Language Signify: Latin in the Italian Humanist Age.- Between the Universal and the Local: Political Linguistics and Social Anthropology from Giambattista Vico to Luigi Serio.- The Anthropological Turn in Poetics: International Law and the Rise of World Literature.- Coda.- Beyond Circulation.- Index.

Galin Tihanov is the George Steiner Professor of Comparative Literature at Queen Mary University of London.