Literature Across Boundaries
Keynote address delivered at the 6th International KTUDELL Conference, 17-18 May 2017
Abstract
This article discusses some theoretical issues raised by the category of world literature, a term used frequently nowadays, and whose paternity is generally attributed to Goethe. The article inscribes Goethe’s proposition for a novel way to consider literary writing into the larger context in which it appears; furthermore, it relates it to the broader cosmopolitan ideal of the times, which constituted the ideological, cultural and theoretical foundation of the new field of comparative literature that emerged in that context. The article raises a series of questions on history and theory of literature pertaining to this twofold emergence of the object and its corresponding discipline, and relates them to the double content of the term world literature, considered both as a determinable literary canon and as a theoretical problem regarding the circulation of cultural goods.
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