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The Absent Cause of World Literature
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 April 2013
Abstract
The resurgence of World Literature must be seen in relation to the economization of all spheres of life. Traditional, ‘specialized’ literary criticism replicates literature's power to interpellate subjects characterized by attention. Both literature and state funded literary criticism in research and teaching are currently under siege because they are counter-hegemonic in relation to a lifeworld shaped by a global attention deficit syndrome, which is the bedrock of a hypertrophic consumerism. Recent proposals for writing histories and systematic descriptions of World Literature are complicit with this move because they champion, to the detriment of deep attention, the relevance, mobility, exchange value, and translatability of texts, successfully competing with traditional ‘painstaking’ practices of literary criticism for ever dwindling institutional resources.
- Type
- Focus: Writing a History of European Literature as Part of a World History of Literature
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- Copyright © Academia Europaea 2013
References
References and Notes
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