At its core is thus a dialectic of the universal and the particular, the cosmopolitan and the local. Moreover, the “literature” in world literature marks the plane of equivalence and comparability between historically distinct and particular traditions of writing

Defined as a space for the preservation and consideration of the diversity of human experience, it is nevertheless tied to the runaway train that is modernization, leveling anything in its path. Auerbach laid out this dialectical element of the concept in these terms: if Weltliteratur is ever realized, it will have cancelled itself.2

More bluntly put, it is hard not to wonder if all this talk of world literature might not be an intellectual correlate of the happy talk that accompanied globalization over the last couple of decades until the financial crash and its ongoing aftermath intro duced a certain reality check into the public discourse.

tions, “world literature” itself may yet be made exilic, a form of reading (and of course writing) that seeks to defamiliarize the world as much as it does literature and explores the possibility of those noncoercive forms of knowl edge often invoked by Said, in Orientalism and elsewhere.

The struggle within and against the inequities of global capitalism now takes place (also) on this terrain of linguistic heterogeneity—hence the relevance of translation, both as practice and as paradigm for cultural transactions between and across disparate linguistic and cultural spaces