The following is an edited transcript of the opening plenary session of the Institute for World Literature in July 2020 – held online as a result of Covid-19. In this conversation with IWL’s director and associate director, Orhan Pamuk discusses his understanding of world literature and his place in it, and his ongoing work on his novel Nights of Plague, then nearing completion.

The article aims to identify limitations and mechanisms that condition the existence of world literature.The concept has generated countless debates, produced a range of approaches and has itselfundergone various modifi cations over the course of several centuries. The article offers an overviewof such discussions and develops a practical framework for the study of Weltliteratur.

Reflecting on several recurring themes in the contributions to this special issue, this essay discusses the interplay between an individual's scholarly formation and the markets in which our work circulates, both within academia and beyond. The examples of Matthew Arnold and Michel Foucault can exemplify what Kenneth Burke described as "perspective by incongruity," with which we can approach the widely disparate works now circulating within world literature, and challenge our own ingrained biases and assumptions in the process.

David Damrosch was interviewed by Wang Ning at the Fifth Sino-American Symposium on Comparative Literature, held in Shanghai, August 2010. The conversation brings together two eminent scholars of comparative literature from the East and West. Wang Ning began by asking the status of world literature in an age of proliferating new media and popular culture. I think you must have made some new Chinese friends and got acquainted with new readers and critics and university students during your visit to Shanghai. Since you are now well-known in China for your remarkable books, What Is World Literature? and How to Read World Literature?, both of which will be published soon in Chinese, Chinese readers will regard you as a pioneering figure in promoting world literature in such an age of globalization. Would you please comment on the significance of world literature in an age of globalization, when literature is often reported to be dead and literary study is severely challenged by the rise of popular culture and consumer culture in postmodern societies? It seems to me that our global world has more need of literature than ever, and of world literature in particular, where so many people's horizons now are international and global in so much movement of people across borders, and academic institutions are so much more opened out to students around the world. This is certainly true in China; we are seeing a massive movement of Chinese students to many other parts of the world. I do think that literature provides a privileged mode of access to thinking about the problems of the globe and the inner life of a culture. Literary works never directly reflect the reality around them, but they refract it, they recreate it as an alternative world always closely connected in some way to our own, and give us a real way to think about the inner tensions and possibilities of the world. Concerning the related question of popular culture, world literature faces competitive challenges into three directions. First, there is always a tension between elite works of artistic literature and more broadly popular literature. William Wordsworth in the Preface to his Lyrical Ballads in 1800 says that the works of Shakespeare were being overwhelmed by frantic novels, sickly and stupid German tragedies, and deluges of idle and extravagant stories in verse. So he already expressed this concern two hundred years ago. Certainly today we have tremendous threat to elite culture from popular literature and a question of reading standards and reading interests. But I think that is just one change. A second change is simply that people are shifting away from reading literature at all in an internet age, and they are now just doing cell phone activities, computer games and so on. But even so, I think this is a very hopeful time for writ-ers themselves, for circulation of literature, for several reasons. Third, I think literature now is fully entering again a multi-media space which is where literature traditionally lived all along. Most literature was not written to be read by isolated individuals. Literature was always part of the social world, whether it would be Tang Dynasty poets gathering together to drink and write poems, or giving poems as parting gifts or greeting gifts, so that poetry was a medium of social exchange almost as much as a source of private aesthetic pleasure. I think that we are probably coming out of the brief, rather artificial period in which the private study of high art was seen as somehow sacrificing everyday life via the social contact. Any great transformation will favour some writers, disfavour others, and probably some important writers will recede and the importance of some others will benefit by these changes. Even though Wordsworth was worried about Shakespeare no longer being read, he was wrong. Shakespeare turned out not to be eclipsed by the rise of the popular novel of Wordsworth's day. Shakespeare is ever more read and translated, more performed all over the world. …

In this interview, David Damrosch ties the ends of his prolific and relevant contribution to literary studies. From the modern development of the concept of world literature to the organization of ambitious projects of World Literature anthologies; from the embracing of many worlds of world literary scholarship to the consideration of the emergence of A.I. and its possible consequences for the literary experience.

ABSTRACTThis essay discusses efforts to write non-Eurocentric histories if civilization, beginning with H. G. Wells’s bestselling Outline of History, an early attempt to move beyond older European histories with their Western focus and ideas of linear progress over time. I then discuss several transitional works in the second half of the twentieth century, before turning to three contemporary works – one Japanese, one Chinese, and one American – that explicitly break with the older Eurocentric emphasis. With these examples in mind, we see the value of multiple histories of the multiple worlds of world civilization.

Long focused primarily on the literature of a few major European powers, comparative studies have increasingly been giving substantial attention to writers in smaller countries and using less widely diffused languages. The rich and varied literatures of the Balkans are ideal candidates for renewed attention, but perhaps because of the number and variety of languages involved, there has been little broadly comparative work on Balkan literature, especially across the region’s language families. This essay proposes that we can learn a great deal, even when working mostly in translation, when we open out a wider perspective to explore the literary commonalities and discontinuities that have emerged across the region’s languages, countries, religions, and imperial histories. Taking examples from Bosnia’s Ivo Andrić, Albania’s Ismail Kadare, and Romania’s Ion Budai-Deleanu and Mircea Cǎrtǎrescu, I argue that their works interfuse Balkan epic traditions and broader European models to contribute powerfully to what can be called a distinctive Balkan world literature.

The following is an edited transcript of a presentation by Pheng Cheah on his book What Is a World? On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature, followed by a discussion with David Damrosch, with selections from the question and answer period. The event took place on the opening day of the July 2018 session of the Institute of World Literature, hosted by Professor Mitsuyoshi Numano and the Department of Contemporary Literary Studies at the University of Tokyo.

Part two of the special issue of World Literature and Postcolonial Studies comes out during extraordinary times.The world is fighting a global pandemic."I can't breathe" and "Black Lives Matter" are no longer expressions that are meaningful only in America.Rather, they have become calls to unite the world against bigotry, racism, and injustice.Meanwhile, Covid-19 has exposed racial, class, and economic inequalities all around the world.If in America, the global pandemic re-emphasized the failing healthcare system, in India it brought forth the biggest movement of people from urban centers to rural communities.Indeed, the migrant crisis in India could only be compared with the plight and tragedy of people during the 1947 partition, many of whom walked for thousands of miles to reach "home."Though the essays published in this special issue were selected before the global pandemic, the revisions and the preparation of the manuscript took place at a time when events were canceled, air and train travel was impossible, and countries were under lockdown.One cannot imagine bringing out this special issue, which has contributions of authors residing in different parts of the world, working on, to name a few, Korean, Australian, Maghrebi, Syrian, Welsh literatures, had the world not been connected through the circulatory network of the internet.Not surprisingly, then, the co-editors see the theme of circulation and movement running through the essays collected here.Often world literature is thought in simple terms as a literature in translation, circulating and leaping across national boundaries only in a handful of languages.Postcolonial literature, on the other hand, is usually assumed to be writing back to a colonial center and circulating in colonizer's languages.Yet both views shouldn't stray too far from actual realities on the ground.A study of literature in translation

This pathbreaking collection explores a new concept in world literature studies. Going beyond the binary opposition of “major” and “minor” literatures, the ultraminor encompasses the literatures of smaller but vibrant regional and linguistic communities. Using cases as varied as the literatures of Malta, Mauritius, and the Faroe Islands, contemporary Nahuatl novels, Kafka in Prague, and Shakespeare in Naples, the ten essays in this volume take up questions of scale and circulation, the interplay of languages and dialects, and ultraminor writers’ resistance to translation and their reliance on it. Ultraminor World Literatures will be of interests to students and scholars of comparative and world literature and to anyone concerned with the ongoing life of unique cultural communities around the world.

This book has its origins in a confluence of interests, derived alike from my prior scholarship and from pedagogical imperatives. l began my scholarly career as a student of the literatures of ancient Greece and early China, fascinated by each tradition individually and drawn to the institutional discipline of comparative literature as the only venue (if in sorne ways a reluctant one) for pursuing such divergent interests. TIle desire to find something useful to say about these two literatures in conjunction with each other that did not depend on daims of contact, and, in particular, to do so in a way that might speak to comparatists as weIl as to specialists in each language individuaIly, led me to consider the phenomenon of authorship in both traditions, and particularly how stories about the lives of authors were used in each context to negotiate the transition from a predominantly oral transmission to transmission through writing. As l was studying, and writing about, that process, l l became especially interested in a similarity between the early Greek and Chinese contexts that l had not noticed, or paid enough attention to, earlier-in both cases, the historical record shows that literary texts (oral or otherwise), and other cultural artifacts, circulated across political boundaries so that the world of a common Greek (Panhellenic)2 or Chinese culture was larger by far th an that of any polity then in existence, providing sorne measure of cultural solidarity to a politically fragmented world.

As a discipline centrally concerned with the study of literature beyond national borders, comparative literature has a deep, and often deeply ambivalent, connection to world literature both as a body of texts and as a competing disciplinary discourse. In creating a niche for themselves in the academic ecosystems of Europe and then elsewhere, the early comparatists allied themselves more with national literatures than with the far broader field of world literature, often for reasons that were as much political as philological. Over the course of the twentieth century, as comparative literature gained its footholds in universities in Europe and elsewhere, comparatists strove to occupy – and defend – a middle ground between the exclusive specificity of national literatures and the enormous multiplicity of the world's literatures. Guerard's civilizational emphasis was reinforced by the question of language.