world literature

This article reflects upon world literature as a socio-cultural construct behind which one can discern particular historical dynamics and tensions. The first part seeks to locate the Anglo-Saxon discourse of world literature vis-à-vis three major reference points: time, space, and language. This chronotopic interrogation allows me to identify focal points of dissent from the currently prevalent liberal mobilisations of 'world literature'. The second part of the article is attempts to locate world literature on the level of literature's self-reflexivity. This is a specific meta-location of world literature which I examine through close attention to a 1930s novel. This enables me to think about dissent as a meta-reflexive position, from which literature itself skeptically relates to the notion of 'world literature'.

Rejecting Eurocentrism of the world literature concept, perspectivism promises an alternative to the center/periphery model. Although perspectivism tends to deny the world-systemic asymmetries, it rightly claims that peripheral cultural interaction may bypass global centers, establishing its networks and centers (e.g., the twentieth-century avant-gardes). Moreover, peripheries enable the reproduction and evolution of global metropolises, even though their contribution is exoticized and anonymized. The modernist poetry of Srečko Kosovel (1904–26) illustrates peripheral productivity and its response to evolutionary processes in the center. It also highlights the systemic obstacles that prevent this information from being globalized.