How to Think World Literature From Its Edge? A Reassessment

Abstract

World literature emerged in the age of industrial capitalism and the beginnings of modern globalization, which established a system of market-based circulation of texts between languages and countries in the nineteenth century. Part of the historicity of world literature is its canonicity. Against the normative horizon of world literature, the actors of a particular (national) literary field perceived their position vis-à-vis the assumed universality of the literary. Theorists of world literature as a single but unequal system insist on the idea of consecration, through which a metropolis endows a peripheral literary product with global esthetic consumption. Although the crucial role of “globalizing consecration” by metropolises cannot be denied, the less visible “capillary worlding” should not be underestimated: through the capillary byways of writer-translator networks, boutique publishers, literary festivals, and journals, works from the periphery of the world literary system find resonance in narrower circles of connoisseurs beyond the confines of their native languages and literatures. The world literary system, determined by the inequalities of capitalism and globalization, is thus the dominant level of world literature, but other levels operate in its shadow, where relations between centers and peripheries are shaped differently. This can be seen in the example of modern Slovenian authors, the fiction writer Florjan Lipuš and the poet Tomaž Šalamun.