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Polysystems Redux: The Unfinished Business of World Literature
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 August 2015
Abstract
In responding to Muhsin al-Musawi’s two-part essay on the Arabic Republic of Letters, this essay proposes a rethinking of the world systems model in global literary studies in terms of a polysystems framework. Rather than trying to fit literary worlds—ancient, premodern, modern—within a single Euro-chronological frame culminating in a world capitalist systems model—where the non-European worlds appear as invariably inferior—it is worthwhile to see them as several polysystems with variable valences within a heterotemporal planetary literary space. This approach offers a comparative reading of the emergence of three language worlds—Sanskrit, Persian, and Arabic—and urges us to rethink the totality of the world literary space as a diachronic field that generates overlapping, multiscalar, comparative histories of literary polysystems.
- Type
- Forum on Literary World Systems
- Information
- Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry , Volume 2 , Issue 2 , September 2015 , pp. 272 - 281
- Copyright
- © Cambridge University Press 2015
References
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2 Ibid., 326.
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6 See Stefan Helgesson’s essay in this forum for the use of terms introversion and extroversion in literary theory.
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23 Ibid., 149.
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