On Literary Worlds

On Literary Worlds

Although literature is not a technology, the historical models literary scholars use to describe it owe a great deal to the languages of originality, novelty, progress, and invention that characterize technological development. However this quintessentially modern mindset--putting progress at the center of historicity--makes it difficult for anyone eager to mount a case for why someone interested in the history of modern literary aesthetics ought to read the literature of the non-Western world. In this groundbreaking book, Eric Hayot argues that contemporary debates about world literature and world literary systems can be rethought through an attention to the world-creating force of aesthetic objects. As he rethinks from the ground up our concepts of literary progress and historicity, Hayot re-describes the history of modern literature as we know it (or as we think we know it), developing new concepts and new formal languages to describe the aesthetic "physics" of the socially and imaginatively possible. Connecting this physics to historical shifts in world-view ranging from Copernicus to Marx, Don Quijote to Battlestar Galactica , On Literary Worlds shows how the very notion of the modern is, at heart, a cosmographical social form, and opens vast new directions for the future analysis of the activity and force of literature. "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 "Highly informed, provocative, and relevant to advanced readers engaged in the study of linguistics and world literature from the perspective of postmodern theory...Recommended." -- Choice "Never less than engaging...The sooner we start arguing about On Literary Worlds , the sooner we start filling in gaps and mapping routes, the better." -- Los Angeles Review of Books Rewrites the literary history of the last 400 years from the perspective of literary worldedness--producing a more global and less Eurocentric theory of literary development Eric Hayot is Professor of Comparative Literature and Asian Studies at Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of The Hypothetical Mandarin , winner of the Modernist Studies Association Book Prize, and Chinese Dreams .