Introduction: World Enough

Introduction: World Enough

This feature topic, “Non-Worldly Literature,” is aimed at responding to the discourse of world literature rising over ten years ago in Western academe. World literature started off as an internal breakup in comparative literature: to popularize cultural competence, the new field would no longer cling to the comparatist principle of reading everything in its language of origin and attending to close reading; and a signature rhetorical device in some of the prominent studies in the field is anecdote. More and more higher education institutions, prestigious ones included, have designed their general education or liberal arts curriculum around this subject matter, offering survey courses in the undergraduate classroom. The survey may span a timeframe of two thousand years and traverse the globe from East to West and back, as transcultural and transhistorical as it gets. What is noteworthy is that world literature is not just a thematic rubric. It is also a doctrine. These overview-style courses provide efficient training for future entrepreneurs and civil leaders. We would like to contest this program/programming, not least because the “being in the world” configured by its advocates really means, if anything, “the global” in the sense of globalization.