World Literature in the Age of Globalization: Reflections on an Anthology

ince the early nineteenth century, Weltliteratur (world literature) has been one of the great Western humanistic ideas. Like many such ideas, it has both reproduced and reinforced a specifically Western worldview. For a long time, “world literature” was synonymous with European literature, but with the vigorous interrogation from a number of perspectives of the primacy of the Western canon, the rise to global celebrity of scores of non-Western writers (including several Nobel laureates and others equally canonized by the Western literary-critical establishment), and the increasing availability of English translations, the teacher of a world literature course today faces an unprecedented abundance of texts from which to choose. Yet this situation is fraught with difficulties of its own, for even as the “globalization of literary studies” emerges as the topic of the hour, the selective inclusion of non-Western texts in critical and pedagogical cadres often reveals new configurations of power and domination. I shall be arguing in this essay that the pedagogical application of the concept of “world literature” in the United States since WWII has developed in step with the political, economic, and strategic remapping of global relations, sometimes in subtle ways that tend to mask its affiliations with power. The globalization of literary studies is articulated in several interrelated domains— critical, curricular, pedagogical—all of which I cannot adequately address within the scope of this essay. I would like, however, to limit my discussion to one aspect of pedagogy, namely the evolution of the single most authoritative and widely used textbook in world literature courses in the United States, The Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces. I shall begin by revisiting the notion of “world literature” itself by way