Any discussion of world literature today is apt to lead critics into a garden of forking paths, a grand narrative that is also an elaborate labyrinth, where each step simultaneously reveals or forecloses apparently infinite possibilities. Or, perhaps, to cite another tale by Jorge Luis Borges from the same period, it is more like the library of Babel, a hauntingly vast bibliographic phantasmagoria in which every imaginable work of literature confronts the bewildered reader, from sheer nonsense to supreme masterpiece, although part of the unending Angst of such an approach to the whole “world” of literature is the awareness that such distinctions cannot be easily made.

The question of world literature, its functions and effects, as well as its value as a formal object of literary study, is deceptively complex. On the one hand, the widespread availability of and interest in literary works produced in various countries, languages, and cultures from around the globe would seem to be wholly beneficial; these texts educate readers about foreign experiences and social forms, while making possible transnational and cross-cultural literary relations. On the other hand, such seemingly cosmopolitan practices have participated in processes of globalization which have frequently elided cultural specificity, either reducing or fetishizing the differences among societies, and at the same time creating a marketplace for a certain type of “world literature,” often at the expense of the variety and wealth of literature written, read, and studied throughout the world. During an era of multinational capitalism or of the globalization of culture, these questions have gained greater urgency and complexity, and it is perhaps not surprising that world literature—as a concept, a field of study, or even a genre—has emerged as a major topic in literary studies in these opening years of the twenty-first century, and it has become a key element of contemporary criticism and theory.

World Literature in the Twenty-First Century

Exemplary of this sense of urgency, Emily Apter’s provocative book, Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability, raises troubling questions about the study of world literature as a disciplinary or subdisciplinary field. To be clear, Apter is for the most part an advocate of expanding the study of literature beyond national borders and linguistic traditions, and she certainly does not argue that literary studies ought to return to a more narrowly circumscribed social, national, or linguistic domain.