Though literature is not a technology, the historical models literary scholars use to describe literary history owe a great deal to the languages of originality, novelty, progress, and invention that core of the idea of technological development. No real surprise: putting progress at the center of historicity is one of the things that makes us moderns. But if you think like a modern person then it's very hard to ever really make a good case for why someone interested in the history of modern literary aesthetics ought to read the literature of the non-Western world. On Literary Worlds makes that case. It does so by rethinking from the ground up our concepts of literary history and progress, redescribing the history we know (or think we know) in a new language that requires us to be far more worldly and global in our arguments about literary change. To do, so, the book begins with an argument that literature is a world-creating activity. If that is true, then a number of scientific and economic discourses (globalization, e.g.) often considered as in some way outside of or "beyond" literature ought instead to be thought of as coeval with it, as partners in humanity's ongoing attempts to think about the nature of the world. The book reads those attempts as "cosmographies" whose social force, measured against the scientific, geographic, and philosophical history of world-concepts, shapes the "physics" of the socially possible. This theory of the cosmographical imagination leads to a claim that thinking worldedness revises existing models of literary history. Connecting the cosmographical imagination to the historical shifts in world-view caused by the Columbian discoveries and Copernican revolutions, On Literary Worlds shows how the very notion of the modern is, at heart, a cosmographical social form. The book does, therefore, three things: (1) it develops a vocabulary for the description of aesthetic worlds; (2) using that vocabulary, it rewrites the history of literature of the last 400 years; and (3) it criticizes the ways in which the institutional structures of literary study distort or limit our capacity to think about historical time.
| ISBN | 0199926697 | | Pages | 224 | | ISBN13 | 9780199926695
(What's this?) | | Weight (grammes) | 372 | | Publisher | Oxford University Press Inc | | Published in | New York | | Imprint | Oxford University Press Inc | | Height (mm) | 213 | | Format | Hardback | | Width (mm) | 148 | | Publication date | 25 Jan 2013 | | Spine width (mm) | 20 | | DEWEY | 809 | | Academic level | Undergraduate, Postgraduate, Professional / Scholarly | | DEWEY edition | DC23 | |
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ; PREFACE ; PART I: LITERARY WORLDS ; 1 THE WORLD AND THE WORK OF ART ; 2 WORLDS, LITERATURE, SYSTEMS ; 3 LITERARY WORLDS ; 4 FIRST PROPOSITIONS ; 5 ASPECTS OF WORLDEDNESS ; PART II: MODES OF MODERN LITERATURE ; 6 THE PLANET AND THE WORLD ; 7 UNIVERSALISM AS A WORLD VIEW ; 8 REALISM, ROMANTICISM, MODERNISM ; 9 SIX VARIABLES, THREE MODES ; PART III: IDEOLOGIES OF THE INSTITUTION ; 10 AGAINST PERIODIZATION ; 11 INSTITUTIONAL PROBLEMS REQUIRE INSTITUTIONAL SOLUTIONS ; PART IV: 4 APPENDICES ; 12 THE EMPTY QUADRANT ; 13 MEDIUM AND FORM ; 14 ON THE HISTORY OF REALITY ; 15 BEYOND THE MODERN
"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
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