World literatures and literary theory
Anchor (Master): Damrosch 2003 What Is World Literature?; Said 1978 Orientalism; Barthes 1967 'The Death of the Author'; Derrida 1967 Of Grammatology; Spivak 2003 Death of a Discipline — full theory and comparative-literature debates
Intuition Beginner
Every people with a language tells stories, sings, and writes. The novels and poems a culture prizes are its literature. Put many cultures' literatures side by side and a new question appears: do all these books add up to one shared thing — world literature — or does each belong only where it was made? This unit studies both the books and the question.
In 1827 the German writer Goethe claimed that a new Weltliteratur — world literature — was emerging, as nations traded books the way they traded goods [Goethe1827]. National literatures would still exist, but readers would increasingly meet works from beyond their own borders. Two centuries later, that prediction has come true: novels from Lagos, Buenos Aires, and Seoul reach readers worldwide, almost always through translation.
Yet whose books get translated, taught, and called "great"? For most of the modern period, a short list of European and American authors dominated that answer. This list is the Western canon. The canon is contested. Some defend it as a shared inheritance of excellent works; others argue it was built by excluding women, the colonised, and whole non-Western traditions that had their own canons long before Europe's. Both positions are live in the field today.
Literature also crosses language only through translation, and translation is never neutral. A translator chooses between making a foreign work feel familiar and letting its foreignness show. Each choice changes the work. World literature is not simply all the world's books gathered together — it is a set of choices about what counts, what crosses, and how.
Finally, readers do not meet a text empty-handed. They bring assumptions about what literature is for: to delight, to teach, to reveal a society's hidden structure, to resist power. These assumptions are literary theory — the lenses we read through. This unit introduces the major lenses and asks, again and again, what each one is good at seeing and what it tends to miss.
Visual Beginner
MAJOR LITERARY TRADITIONS BY REGION (representative peaks)
SANSKRIT (South Asia)
c. 1500 BCE Rig Veda (hymns)
c. 400 BCE–400 CE Epics: Mahabharata (~100,000 couplets), Ramayana
c. 4th–5th c. CE Kalidasa, Abhijnanashakuntalam
c. 9th c. CE Anandavardhana, Dhvanyaloka (theory of suggestion / dhvani)
CHINESE (East Asia)
c. 1000 BCE Shijing (Classic of Poetry) — bi, xing, fu categories
206 BCE–220 CE Han: Sima Qian, Records of the Grand Historian
618–907 CE Tang poetry (Li Bai, Du Fu, Wang Wei)
960–1279 Song lyric (ci); Su Shi; Li Qingzhao
1368–1644 Ming vernacular novel (Luo Guanzhong; Cao Xueqin later, Qing)
ARABIC / PERSIAN (West Asia, North Africa)
6th–7th c. Pre-Islamic qasida (Mu'allaqat)
c. 1010 CE Shahnameh (Ferdowsi, Persian epic)
11th c. al-Jurjani, Asrar al-Balagha (rhetorical theory)
13th–14th c. Rumi (Masnavi); Hafez (Divan)
14th c. Alf layla wa layla (The Thousand and One Nights, compiled)
AFRICAN (Sub-Saharan: oral + written)
c. 13th c. Sundiata epic (Mande, oral)
16th c. onward Yoruba oriki (praise poetry); Igbo proverbs; Akan Ananse
1958 onward Written literatures (Achebe, Soyinka, Ngugi, Adichie)
LATIN AMERICAN
pre-16th c. Popol Vuh (K'iche' Maya); Nahuatl verse (Nezahualcoyotl)
1888 onward Modernismo (Ruben Dario, Azul...)
1960s–1970s The Boom (Garcia Marquez, Fuentes, Cortazar, Vargas Llosa)
WESTERN CANON (for comparison — the contested reference point)
c. 8th c. BCE Homer (Iliad ~15,700 lines, Odyssey)
5th c. BCE Greek tragedy (Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides)
14th c. CE Dante, Divina Commedia
19th c. European realist novel (Austen, Balzac, Tolstoy)Worked example Beginner
Applying a post-colonial lens to a concrete passage.
A lens is a focused question. A post-colonial lens asks: who gets to narrate whom, in whose language, and whose story survives the encounter? Watch it work on the end of Chinua Achebe's novel Things Fall Apart (1958).
The novel has spent two hundred pages rendering Igbo life from the inside — its proverbs, kinship, ritual, and law — in an English that carries Igbo cadence. On the final page the British District Commissioner looks at the body of the protagonist Okonkwo. The Commissioner decides the suicide would make a "reasonable paragraph" in the book he is writing, which he plans to title The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
Apply the lens. The word pacification hides the violence of conquest behind the calm language of administration. The word primitive freezes a living, changing culture in ethnographic time. The title reduces a full human life — and the novel that held it — to a line in a colonial report. The lens shows the novel staging its own warning: the colonised story must be told before the colonial archive rewrites it into a footnote.
Note what the lens sees and what it does not. Post-colonial reading exposes the power inside narration. It is less sharp for the novel's domestic scenes, its theology, its prose rhythm — other lenses (close reading, ecocriticism) catch those. No single lens exhausts a text; the discipline is knowing which lens the passage rewards.
Check your understanding Beginner
Formal definition Intermediate+
The definitions below fix the working vocabulary of comparative literature and literary theory, following Culler [Culler2011] and Damrosch [Damrosch2003].
Literature names (a) the practice of writing valued for its form and imaginative reach, and (b) the body of texts a culture has institutionally marked as such. The two senses slide: "literature" is both a quality of language and a canon of objects. Theory refuses to collapse the slide, because how a culture decides what counts is itself part of the subject.
Comparative literature is the study of literature across the boundaries that organise single-national curricula — language, nation, period, genre, and medium. Its method is juxtaposition: it reads texts together that single-field approaches keep apart, in order to see what no one tradition makes visible alone.
World literature, in Damrosch's influential formulation, is not the sum of all national literatures but a mode of circulation and reading: a work becomes world literature as it gains through translation and moves beyond its culture of origin [Damrosch2003]. Three competing definitions circulate in the field: (1) the canon of works considered great across cultures; (2) a circulatory system of texts moving through translation and markets; (3) a method of comparative reading alert to how texts travel. These definitions are positions, not synonyms.
A canon is the set of texts a community treats as authoritative and worth transmitting. Canon formation is governed by institutions (schools, publishers, prize committees, academies) and is therefore historical and contestable. Canon revision is the practice of expanding or reordering a canon to include works the institutions had suppressed — women, the colonised, working-class, and non-metropolitan writers.
Translation, in the theory of Lawrence Venuti, splits into domesticating strategies (bringing the foreign text to the reader by smoothing its strangeness) and foreignizing strategies (making the reader meet the foreignness halfway). The choice is never neutral: it positions the reader either as a host who expects guests to conform, or as a guest who adjusts. Literary translation is thus an act of interpretation with stakes the source text does not control.
Literariness (Russian formalism's literaturnost') is the quality that makes language function as literature — the devices (rhythm, defamiliarisation, parallelism, patterning) that make language perceptible as language rather than transparent. Defamiliarisation (ostranenie, Shklovsky 1917) is the technique of making the familiar strange so that perception is renewed rather than automatic.
The sign, after Saussure [Saussure1916], is the union of a signifier (the sound-image or mark) and a signified (the concept). The relation between them is arbitrary (no natural bond links the sound "tree" to the concept) and differential (a sign means by not being the other signs). Structuralism extends this principle to literary systems: a genre or motif means by its place in a system of differences.
Deconstruction (Derrida) is the practice of showing that a text's explicit argument depends on conceptual oppositions (literal/figurative, speech/writing, presence/absence) that the same text also destabilises. The text is read against itself: the secondary term is shown to be a condition of the primary one, not its derivative [Derrida1967].
Reader-response theory (Iser, Fish) treats meaning as an event produced by a reader's interaction with the text. The text offers "gaps" the reader fills; interpretive communities share conventions that determine what counts as a reading. Meaning is not deposited in the text waiting to be extracted.
New Historicism (Greenblatt, Montrose) reads literary texts as documents embedded in, and acting upon, the material culture and power relations of their moment. It refuses the wall between "literary" and "historical" texts: a play and a court record are read together as coeval productions of the same culture.
Ecocriticism studies the representation of the non-human world in literature and the environmental consequences of the stories a culture tells about land, animals, and climate. It asks whether a text treats nature as backdrop, resource, subject, or agent.
Critical theory Intermediate+
The schools as positions on what literature is for
Literary theory is not a single doctrine but a set of answers, advanced since 1915, to two questions: what does literature do? and how does it mean? Each school refuses a previous answer and proposes a new centre of gravity. The schools disagree, but the disagreement is productive: it names the choices a reader must make.
Russian formalism (Shklovsky, Jakobson, Eikhenbaum, c. 1915–1930) refused the inherited habit of explaining literature by authorial biography or social message. Literature, the formalists held, is the use of devices that make language perceptible — rhythm, sound pattern, unusual syntax, defamiliarisation. The object of study is how the text is built, not what it reflects. The school was suppressed politically in the USSR by 1930 but its vocabulary (device, function, literariness) passed everywhere.
New Criticism (Brooks, Wimsatt, Beardsley, Ransom, c. 1940–1960) advanced a cognate thesis in the American academy: the poem is an autonomous verbal object, to be read by close reading of its internal tensions, paradoxes, and irony — not by appeal to authorial intention or reader feeling. Wimsatt and Beardsley's "intentional fallacy" (1946) and "affective fallacy" (1949) are the discipline's way of bracketing author and reader to isolate the text.
Structuralism (mid-20th century, after Saussure) refused the New Critical focus on the single artefact and asked instead after the systems that make meaning possible — genre codes, mythic patterns, narrative grammar. Barthes and Jakobson treated a text as a message produced by combinatorial rules; Lévi-Strauss read myths across cultures as transformations of underlying structures. The unit of analysis shifts from the poem to the system.
Post-structuralism and deconstruction (Derrida, de Man, Barthes's later work, from 1967) refused structuralism's confidence that the system could be mapped. Derrida argued that the oppositions on which meaning rests (signified/signifier, speech/writing) are internally unstable: the "secondary" term is the condition of the "primary" one [Derrida1967]. In the same year Barthes declared the death of the author: the text is a tissue of citations, its unity produced not by an origin but by a destination — the reader [Barthes1967]. Meaning is deferred (différance), never fully present.
Reader-response (Iser, Fish, Holland) put what formalism and New Criticism had bracketed — the reader — at the centre. Iser's text has "gaps" the reader must fill; Fish argued that "interpretive communities" produce the readings their conventions make possible. The text is an occasion for a reader's structured work, not a sealed container.
Post-colonial theory (Said, Spivak, Bhabha) refused the silence of metropolitan theory about empire. Said's Orientalism [Said1978] showed how Western scholarship produced "the Orient" as an object of knowledge, and how that production underwrote colonial rule. Post-colonial reading asks how a text positions the coloniser and the colonised, whose language is published, and whose speech the archive records. Spivak's question — can the subaltern speak, within the terms the dominant discourse allows? — turns the lens back on comparative literature's own categories.
New Historicism (Greenblatt, c. 1980) refused the formalist wall between text and context. A Shakespeare play is read beside sermons, conduct books, and state papers from the same decade, because all are products of the same discursive field. Literature does not reflect its age so much as do work in it, negotiating power and belief.
Ecocriticism (from c. 1990) refuses the human-only frame. It asks how a text figures land, animals, weather, and matter, and what environmental politics a given figuration licenses — whether nature is a passive setting, a storehouse, a fellow-agent, or a relation. The lens reads Beloved or The Grapes of Wrath for how they treat soil, river, and climate as actors rather than scenery.
One poem, several lenses
Watch the schools diverge on a single short object — Basho's haiku (c. 1686), in a literal translation:
old pond
a frog jumps in —
sound of water
A formalist reading marks the devices: the syntactic pause after "pond," the onomatopoeia of the splash, the cut between stillness and motion that the kireji (cutting word) enacts. A New Critical reading finds the paradox the poem holds open — the ancient stillness of the pond against the instantaneous act — and treats the resolution as irony rather than message. A structuralist reading places the haiku in the system of Japanese poetic codes (season-word, 5–7–5, zazen silence) and reads it as a combination of slots. A reader-response reading describes how the poem stages a gap — what kind of sound? whose silence? — that the reader must fill to complete it. A post-colonial / translation-theory reading asks what the English version has cost: the season-word (kigo) is gone, the cutting word cannot be reproduced, and the frog sounds different in a language whose readers do not share the temple's conventions. Each lens sees something the others blur; none is wrong, and none is sufficient.
Bridge. This account of the schools builds toward the Master-tier debates on canon and world literature below, and appears again in the philosophy-of-language treatment of reference, intention, and the speech act 20.12.01. The central insight is that every reading already presupposes a theory of meaning; this is exactly why the schools disagree yet share one question — what does literature do, and for whom? The foundational reason theory cannot be put aside is that interpretation always already uses it, and the bridge is between naming the lens one reads through and pretending to read without any.
Exercises Intermediate+
Advanced results Master
Two positions on the canon
The canon debate is the field's central contest, and a serious account must hold both sides open rather than declaring a winner. Position 1 — the canon as aesthetic inheritance. Harold Bloom's The Western Canon (1994) argues that a small set of works — from Shakespeare to Cervantes to Tolstoy — survives because it meets a standard of imaginative and cognitive power that later writers struggle against and readers return to. On this view the canon is not a political list but a record of what has continued to reward close reading across generations; to teach it is to transmit a hard-won inheritance, not to ratify an elite. Position 2 — the canon as a political formation. Henry Louis Gates Jr., Barbara Smith, Paul Lauter, and the broader canon-revisionist movement argue that "intrinsic value" is inseparable from the institutions that produced it: the metropolitan university, the publishing house, the prize committee. What was excluded — women, the enslaved, the colonised, the non-Western, the working-class — was excluded by structure, not by merit; recovery and revision reveal that the canon's universality was a particularity wearing universal dress. The two positions do not reduce to each other: Bloom is right that not every text rewards equal attention, and the revisionists are right that the set of texts historically granted such attention was narrowed by power. A defensible comparative practice holds both — it reads closely, and it asks who taught it to do so.
Three positions on world literature
The definitional question — what is world literature? — receives three materially different answers in the post-1990 debate, each of which reorganises the field. (a) Circulation (Damrosch). A work is world literature insofar as it circulates beyond its culture of origin and gains through translation [Damrosch2003]; the object of study is the life of the work in motion, not the work frozen at its origin. (b) The world republic of letters (Casanova). Pascale Casanova's The World Republic of Letters (1999; English 2004) describes a global literary space with a centre (the consecrating capitals — Paris especially) and a periphery; writers from the periphery seek consecration at the centre, and "world literature" is the product of that unequal struggle for literary legitimacy. (c) Distant reading (Moretti). Franco Moretti argues that the scale of world literature defeats close reading: to grasp the rise of the novel across the globe one must read at a distance — synoptic, quantitative, schematic — surrendering the reading of individual texts to grasp the system's shape. The three are not reconcilable by addition. Damrosch keeps the individual work as the unit; Casanova keeps it but subordinates it to the struggle for consecration; Moretti dissolves the individual work into the system. Spivak's challenge [Spivak2003] cuts across all three: each takes "circulation," "the centre," or "the system" as a given, when the decisive fact may be what these structures render unsayable.
Translation as the hinge
World literature is largely read in translation, which makes translation theory load-bearing rather than ornamental. Walter Benjamin's "The Task of the Translator" (1923) argues that translation does not reproduce the meaning of the original so much as release the pure language that all literary works share beneath their difference — a messianic claim that makes the translation a survival (Uberleben) of the original rather than a copy. Lawrence Venuti's The Translator's Invisibility (1995) reframes the choice in institutional terms: the dominant Anglo-American tradition rewards domestication (the translator vanishes, the foreign text reads as if written in English), which quietly assimilates the foreign; foreignization keeps a visible strangeness and asks the reader to move toward the text. The choice is ethical and political, not technical: domestication produces fluent world literature at the cost of erasing the work's foreignness, while foreignization preserves that foreignness at the cost of a smaller readership. The Bengali and Latin American cases sharpen the point — Rabindranath Tagore's self-translation of Gitanjali into a devotional English that won the 1913 Nobel was a domesticating choice that gained circulation while altering the poems; the Latin American Boom reached world status through English and French translations that, critics argue, selected and reframed the work for metropolitan taste.
Post-colonial depth
Post-colonial theory is the strand that most directly contests the innocence of "world literature" as a category. Said's Orientalism [Said1978] shows that the West's knowledge of "the Orient" was a production — a system of representations that made the East available for rule — and this insight generalises to literary circulation: what metropolitan readers receive as "African literature" or "Asian literature" is shaped by the same representational machinery. Homi Bhabha's The Location of Culture (1994) adds the concept of hybridity: the colonised subject's speech is never pure resistance or pure imitation but a third space in which authority is mimicked and thereby destabilised. Spivak's "Can the Subaltern Speak?" (1988) presses hardest: when the subaltern is represented by metropolitan discourse, even sympathetic representation effaces the subaltern's own voice, because the terms of representation belong to the dominant. The consequence for comparative literature is that "adding" non-Western texts to the syllabus does not by itself produce world literature; it may reproduce the old structure under a wider banner. The discipline's honesty depends on reading its own categories as part of the data.
Synthesis. Putting these together, world literature is at once a selection of works, a system of cross-cultural circulation, and a method of reading — the central insight being that none of these senses is prior to the others. This is exactly why Damrosch's circulation model, Said's account of imperial knowledge, and Spivak's warning about the discipline's limits resist fusion into a single framework: they are positions on what literature is for. The foundational reason the canon debate never settles is that every act of selection embeds a value judgment; the bridge is between enlarging the archive and changing the question, and the comparative method generalises across the Sanskrit, Chinese, Arabic, Persian, African, and Latin American traditions surveyed here without collapsing their differences into one world-story.
Connections Master
This unit presupposes the close-reading vocabulary built in the literature sequence 22.03.01, where literal and figurative language, metaphor, symbol, and irony are defined as analytic categories. The schools of theory introduced here are what you get when those categories are made answerable to larger questions — what literature is for, whose meaning counts, how power enters the text. A student who can already mark a metaphor 22.03.01 is now in a position to ask, with New Criticism, what paradox that metaphor holds open, and with deconstruction, what opposition the metaphor depends on and destabilises.
The unit feeds directly into creative writing 22.06.01 pending by supplying the reading-side mirror of the writer's craft. Where the creative-writing unit treats specificity, scene, and significant detail as the writer's tools, theory treats them as the reader's evidence — the formalist's "device," the New Critic's "tension," and the translator's "loss" are all names for the same sentence-level phenomena viewed from the other side. A writer who understands that a foreignizing translation preserves strangeness, and that a post-colonial reading tracks who narrates whom, has a sharper sense of the ethical weight of every craft choice.
The philosophy-of-language unit 20.12.01 supplies the bedrock on which every school here stands. Saussure's arbitrary, differential sign [Saussure1916] is the structuralist premise; the speech-act theory of Austin and Searle underwrites reader-response and New Historicism's claim that texts do things; and the deconstructive destabilisation of the literal/figurative boundary [Derrida1967] is continuous with the philosophy of language's treatment of reference, intention, and the slippage between saying and meaning. Literary theory and philosophy of language are not neighbours but two descriptions of the same problem of how signs mean.
Historical & philosophical context Master
The idea of world literature has a precise origin. In conversations recorded by Johann Peter Eckermann on 31 January 1827, Goethe remarked that "national literature is now a rather unmeaning term; the epoch of world literature is at hand," and he returned to the theme on 15 October 1827, citing his reading of a Chinese novel and a Serbian folksong as evidence that the European writer must look beyond Europe [Goethe1827]. Goethe's Weltliteratur was not a programme for a single canon but a prediction of cross-cultural exchange; it would be reframed as a discipline only later. Comparative literature emerged as an academic field in the late nineteenth century, with chairs in France and the founding of the American Comparative Literature Association in 1960, but its early practice remained overwhelmingly Eurocentric even as it invoked Goethe's global term.
The theory revolution has a clear chronology. Russian formalism crystallised around the Moscow Linguistic Circle (founded 1915) and Opoyaz (Society for the Study of Poetic Language, 1916); Viktor Shklovsky's essay "Art as Technique" (1917) introduced ostranenie (defamiliarisation) [Shklovsky1917], and Roman Jakobson defined literariness (literaturnost') as the proper object of literary science. The school was suppressed under Stalinist doctrine by 1930, its members dispersed or silenced, and its concepts migrated westward through Jakobson and the Prague School. Ferdinand de Saussure's Cours de linguistique générale, published posthumously in 1916 from student notes [Saussure1916], provided the semiotic apparatus — the arbitrary, differential sign — that structuralism would adopt forty years later.
New Criticism took the formalist method into the American university. Cleanth Brooks's The Well Wrought Urn (1947) made paradox the engine of poetic meaning, and W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley's essays on the "intentional fallacy" (1946) and "affective fallacy" (1949) bracketed author and reader to isolate the text. Structuralism's ascendancy came in the 1960s, when Roland Barthes and the Tel Quel group applied Saussurean semiotics to cultural and literary systems; the high moment was brief. In 1967 two texts broke the structuralist confidence: Barthes's "La mort de l'auteur" declared the author dead and relocated meaning to the reader [Barthes1967], and Jacques Derrida's De la grammatologie argued that the sign's instability undid the very system structuralism had mapped [Derrida1967]. Deconstruction followed, and with it the wider theoretical turn.
The post-colonial intervention came a decade later. Edward Said's Orientalism (1978) argued that Western scholarship had produced "the Orient" as a discursive object inseparable from colonial power [Said1978]; the book founded a field. Gayatri Spivak's "Can the Subaltern Speak?" (1988) and Homi Bhabha's The Location of Culture (1994) extended the analysis to representation, hybridity, and voice. World literature returned as a live programmatic question when David Damrosch's What Is World Literature? (2003) redefined the term as circulation and reading rather than canon [Damrosch2003], provoking the debate with Pascale Casanova and Franco Moretti surveyed in the Advanced results. Spivak's Death of a Discipline (2003) [Spivak2003] closed the opening decade by asking comparative literature to give up its old area-studies innocence and submit its own categories to critique.
Bibliography Master
@incollection{goethe1827weltliteratur,
author = {Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von},
title = {Conversations of Goethe with Eckermann and Soret},
note = {Entries of 31 Jan.\ and 15 Oct.\ 1827; loci classici for Weltliteratur},
publisher = {Da Capo Press reprint},
year = {1998}
}
@book{saussure1916cours,
author = {de Saussure, Ferdinand},
title = {Course in General Linguistics},
translator= {Wade Baskin},
publisher = {McGraw-Hill},
year = {1959},
note = {Original French edition 1916}
}
@incollection{shklovsky1917technique,
author = {Shklovsky, Viktor},
title = {Art as Technique},
year = {1917},
note = {Introduced ostranenie (defamiliarisation); anthologised in Russian Formalist Criticism}
}
@book{brooks1947urn,
author = {Brooks, Cleanth},
title = {The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry},
publisher = {Reynal and Hitchcock},
year = {1947}
}
@article{wimsatt1946intentional,
author = {Wimsatt, W. K. and Beardsley, Monroe C.},
title = {The Intentional Fallacy},
journal = {The Sewanee Review},
volume = {54},
number = {3},
pages = {468--488},
year = {1946}
}
@incollection{barthes1967death,
author = {Barthes, Roland},
title = {The Death of the Author},
year = {1967},
note = {Trans.\ in {Image, Music, Text} (Fontana, 1977), pp.\ 142--148}
}
@book{derrida1967grammatology,
author = {Derrida, Jacques},
title = {Of Grammatology},
translator= {Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty},
publisher = {Johns Hopkins University Press},
year = {1976},
note = {Original French edition 1967}
}
@incollection{benjamin1923translator,
author = {Benjamin, Walter},
title = {The Task of the Translator},
year = {1923},
note = {Trans.\ in {Illuminations} (Schocken, 1968)}
}
@book{said1978orientalism,
author = {Said, Edward W.},
title = {Orientalism},
publisher = {Pantheon Books},
year = {1978}
}
@incollection{spivak1988subaltern,
author = {Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty},
title = {Can the Subaltern Speak?},
year = {1988},
note = {In {Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture} (Nelson \& Grossberg, eds.)}
}
@book{bloom1994canon,
author = {Bloom, Harold},
title = {The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages},
publisher = {Harcourt Brace},
year = {1994}
}
@book{bhabha1994location,
author = {Bhabha, Homi K.},
title = {The Location of Culture},
publisher = {Routledge},
year = {1994}
}
@book{casanova2004republic,
author = {Casanova, Pascale},
title = {The World Republic of Letters},
publisher = {Harvard University Press},
year = {2004},
note = {Original French edition 1999}
}
@book{damrosch2003world,
author = {Damrosch, David},
title = {What Is World Literature?},
publisher = {Princeton University Press},
year = {2003}
}
@incollection{moretti2000conjectures,
author = {Moretti, Franco},
title = {Conjectures on World Literature},
year = {2000},
note = {Distant reading program; collected in {Distant Reading} (Verso, 2013)}
}
@book{venuti1995invisibility,
author = {Venuti, Lawrence},
title = {The Translator's Invisibility: A History of Translation},
publisher = {Routledge},
year = {1995}
}
@book{culler2011literary,
author = {Culler, Jonathan},
title = {Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction},
edition = {2},
publisher = {Oxford University Press},
year = {2011}
}
@book{spivak2003death,
author = {Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty},
title = {Death of a Discipline},
publisher = {Columbia University Press},
year = {2003}
}
@incollection{achebe1977image,
author = {Achebe, Chinua},
title = {An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's {Heart of Darkness}},
year = {1977},
note = {Second Chancellor's Lecture, University of Massachusetts}
}