Many people have read more and better than I have, of course, but still, we are talking of hundreds of languages and literatures here. Reading ‘more’seems hardly to be the solution. Especially because we’ve just started rediscovering what Margaret Cohen calls the ‘great unread’.‘I work on West European narrative, etc....’Not really, I work on its canonical fraction, which is not even one per cent of published literature. And again, some people have read more, but the point is that there are thirty thousand nineteenth-century British novels out there, forty, fifty, sixty thousand—no one really knows, no one has read them, no one ever will. And then there are French novels, Chinese, Argentinian, American... Reading ‘more’is always a good thing, but not the solution. 1

Perhaps it’s too much, tackling the world and the unread at the same time. But I actually think that it’s our greatest chance, because the sheer enormity of the task makes it clear that world literature cannot be literature, bigger; what we are already doing, just more of it. It has to be different. The categories have to be different.‘It is not the “actual” interconnection of “things”’, Max Weber wrote,‘but the conceptual interconnection of problems which define the scope of the various sciences. A new “science” emerges where a new problem is pursued by a new method.’2 That’s the point: world literature is not an object, it’s a problem, and a problem that asks for a new critical method: and no one has ever found a method by just reading more texts. That’s not how theories come into being; they need a leap, a wager—a hypothesis, to get started.