Scales, systems, and meridians

This chapter’s brief is to introduce the question of the scale of world literature, a task one initially assumes will be a matter of ascertaining its ‘relative or proportionate size or extent’ (Oxford English Dictionary, 3.I2.a). I begin by raising the question of faith, though, as there would seem to be little point in trying to get the measure of an object that no one believes exists. Granted, the existence of atoms and planets do not depend on one’s faith in them, but ‘world literature’ is not a concept like an atom or a planet; or at least not necessarily. What I will argue in this chapter is that the question of the scale of world literature pivots on whether one regards the term as having an ideal or empirical referent

Publishing, translating, worldmaking

As Stefan Helgesson and Pieter Vermeulen have pointed out, world literature, as an object of study, has to be made; it cannot simply be found. As readers, students, and teachers of world literature, we construct literary worlds by discerning relations at a range of scales: between devices, works, genres, traditions. Like the more general making of symbolic worlds theorized by Nelson Goodman in the wake of Ernst Cassirer, this specific kind 'always starts from worlds already on hand: the making is a remaking'. Our versions of world literature revise previous versions, often by pointing to what has been left out and stressing its value. Translation does this implicitly and prspectively, providing new materials for the remaking of world literature by allowing works to circulate more widely. But that circulation is channelled and restricted by social, economic, and political forces, which I will explore in this chapter, drawing in part and implicitly on my practical experience as a literary translator