On Literary Worlds

The study of World literature under conditions of enhanced technologies of cultural distribution and access, poses new challenges to the twenty-first century humanities curriculum. Hayot's timely book on literary worlds--in many ways an attempt to rewrite Erich Auerbach's Mimesis for the era of the digital humanities--rethinks traditional paradigms of literary history and cultural comparison, especially as they pertain to age-old east-west divisionism. Critically bold and engagingly written, On Literary Worlds makes an important contribution to philosophical and political interrogations of the status of 'world' in World Literature. -Emily Apter, author of Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability On Literary Worlds promises to make an important and timely contribution to the debates surrounding the increasingly popular though wildly vague notion of 'World Literature.' As leading American universities begin to invest tremendous financial resources and intellectual energies into expanding their so-called 'global presence' it becomes ever more crucial for scholars and administrators to define what this global gesture means or is meant to accomplish. Hayot's exquisite little book does the very big job of rethinking the very terms on which we think about literature and which in turn, he shows us, reveal how we think about the world. --Anne Anlin Cheng, author of Second Skin: Josephine Baker and the Modern Surface A bold, ambitious, and inspiring call for revising the way we think about, practice, and teach literary history. --New Books in Literary Studies Highly informed, provocative, and relevant to advanced readers engaged in the study of linguistics and world literature from the perspective of postmodern theory...Recommended. --Choice Never less than engaging...The sooner we start arguing about On Literary Worlds, the sooner we start filling in gaps and mapping routes, the better. --Los Angeles Review of Books