In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Final Remarks
  • Barbara Harlow (bio), Sarah Brouillette (bio), David Thomas (bio), Joshua Clover (bio), and David Damrosch (bio)

Barbara Harlow: “In the meantime …,” according to Immanuel Wallerstein’s 2004 keynote address at Cornell University, “the jury is still out,” as the WReC would seem to want to add. The status, the stature even, perhaps as well the statutory disposition of world literature—and world-literature—are still in the theories of adjudication before sundry courts of world opinion—curricular, universitarian, as well as professional and popular. The charges and indictments—combined and uneven alike—are manifold and manifest, the prosecution aggressive and the defense no less so in their examinations and cross-examinations of professors, professions, and professionalism. Disciplined and disciplining, the parties to the case each take the stand and take their stands—and each other to task—before an array of juries where the voir-dire (or jury selection process) is no less in dispute. World literature, to further mix up the metaphors, would seem to be the subject of some literary critical version of “enhanced interrogation techniques”—the George W. Bush administration’s lamentable euphemism for what international law has condemned as “torture.” In such vexing academic situations, however, what might the extraterritorial principle of “universal jurisdiction” have to contribute? According to that principle, national courts are allowed to try cases of grievous crimes against humanity whether or not these abuses have been committed in the national territory itself and indeed whether or not their very perpetrators (or victims) are nationals of the country hearing the charges and prosecuting the case.

National sovereignty, then, or universal jurisdiction? Your literature? My literature? Our literature? Whose literature? Where is the grievous wrong? Who will make it right? When it comes to questions of world-literature, which priority will prevail before international courts of justice and/or courts of world opinion? Or indeed in academic guilds and forums and before the boards of contracting publisher’s anthologies? No less [End Page 551] demanding, however—and just as controversial perhaps—is the question of just how the study and indeed the very profession of comparative/world literature might eventually (eventfully?) contribute to the adjudication of such territorial and litigable boundaries (fields become battlefields, if you will) and their vexed definitions across the scriptural terrain of international law. What, that is, might be the historical and political responsibilities of comparative literature cum world literature practitioners in rethinking the critical keywords of combined and uneven intercultural relations—in the contemporary and conflicted global disorder? Such responsibilities, intellectual and institutional alike, reside, I would even now suggest, in both the recognition of national sovereignties and erstwhile claims to self-determination (and their literary expressions) and a conscionable attention to the worldly exercise of competing representations of protagonists and antagonists in national, aspirational self-determining narratives. In a world order too often divided between victims and perpetrators (to borrow again from the current human rights lexicon), a political geography of comparative/world literature, whether as an academic discipline or as a political avocation, the self-professing litter-critter will be hard put to find recourse or even retreat in the niche of a bystander.

Academic as the case of world-literature might seem, it is not without political and humanitarian resonance after all. The humanities—if not the human—are in dispute, not to mention disrepute. The stakes are high enough, but meanwhile the deeps of states, deep states—core, peripheral, and semi-peripheral—remain only superficially plumbed. Combined and/or uneven as it may be, the discussion raised by the Warwick Research Collective’s provocative foray into the “combined and uneven development” of not only “world-literature,” but world literature as so imperiously championed by its advocates as well, delimits perhaps a preliminary way forward, collective especially, and exemplary too, in the problematic of its case study of the possibilities of case studies as a resistant “accumulation by possession” for shared research trajectories and agendas—and further cross-examinations.

Sarah Brouillette and David Thomas: In their response to our review, the authors suggest that they deliberately set aside sociological or “Bourdieusian” concerns, having “opted, for practical reasons of time and space, to concentrate on...

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