After the Debate Over World Literature

For those literary critics who have yet to formulate a coherent position for or against world literature, I bring good news: recent evidence suggests that the polarity is not worth the trouble, and I receive this as good news for us all. It comes in the form of the two books that I welcome warmly here, and not only because each one makes a meaningful contribution to scholarly debates over world literature. Taken together, they place "world literature" among other ways to describe the hegemonic forces—for example, globalization, gravity, imperialism, and the United States—that govern our world, whether we like them or not. Seeing the sheer facticity of world literature in this context, Aamir Mufti's Forget English! Orientalisms and World Literaturesand the Warwick Research Collective's (WReC) Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literaturetrace its causes and effects with ecumenical uses of Marxist, postcolonial, and world-systems theory. That synthetic approach heralds a new era in a critical conversation that has become moribund, even though the question at its center remains pressing: what is the best way to read literature on a global scale?

This question has become central to literary scholarship in the U.S., but progress toward answers has been slow, and not always for good reasons. The scholarly conversation that advances it halts more regularly than most, allowing literary critics to posture, as we tend to do when we invest our critical terms with more currency than definition. That imbalance plagues the English translation of weltliteratur, whose prominence in the titles of literary conferences, monographs, and talks goes unmatched by any consensus about what it means. Its referents include, among other things: the aesthetics of toothless globalism evidenced in bad novels and Miramax movies; the homogenization of local cultures under global capital; the blindness of critics to the interpretive complexities that attend literary translation; and a methodology that comes with a profit motive, for maximizing the sale of textbooks in a global market. In all these guises, however, "world literature" elicits frowns from the faculty of literature departments, because it suggests degrees of quietism about the status quo. More precisely, it evidences an unsavory complicity with the expressions of neoliberalism that make life more ugly and difficult for humanists who work at universities in the U.S. today.

The resonance between "world literature" and "neoliberalism" is more widely assumed than carefully argued, and it has implications beyond the obvious. These critical terms work in tandem for literary study in an era of globalization and they connote each other; yet they also share a rhetorical function that should give us pause. That function is illuminated in "Six Theories of Neoliberalism" by media theorist Terry Flew, who used digital technologies to cull a huge swath of research published in the U.S. between 1990 and 2007 to show how "neoliberalism" emerged as a dominant "rhetorical trope" for the humanities (52). ¹While our colleagues in economics and political science honed rich vocabularies to theorize monetarism, for example, in relationship to the new right, humanists placed undue weight on neoliberalism to gesture broadly toward "the way things are" but should not be (Flew 51). This breadth of reference rendered neoliberalism useful "as an all-purpose denunciatory category," a bogeyman to make its opponents look good by contrast. This indiscriminate usage was predicted by economists like Andrew Gamble, who warned against a nascent and unhelpful "tendency to reify neo-liberalism and to treat it as a phenomenon which manifests itself everywhere and in everything" (134). ²That tendency is rife in the discursive community that Flew studied, the very same community that Mufti and the WReC enter, and not a moment too soon. What humanists did to "neoliberalism," we did to "world literature," too, emptying the term of specificity...