Debating World Literature

Christopher Prendergast is Professor of Modern French Literature at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of King's College Cambridge. He is the co-editor of World Reader, an anthology of world literature.Benedict Anderson is Aaron L. Binenkorp Professor of International Studies Emeritus at Cornell University. He is editor of the journal Indonesia and author of Java in a Time of Revolution, The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia, and the World and Imagined Communities.Emily Apter is Professor of Comparative Literature and French at New York University. Her published works include The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature and Continental Drift: From National Characters to Subjects.Stanley Corngold is Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Princeton University. He is translator and editor of the Norton Critical Edition of Metamorphosis, author of Lambent Traces: Franz Kafka, Franz Kafka: The Necessity of Form, Complex Pleasure: Forms of Feeling in German Literature, The Fate of the Self: German Writers and French Theory, and Thomas Mann, 1875-1955. He is the recipient of Literary Paternity, Literary Friendship: Essays in Honor of Stanley Corngold.Franco Moretti teaches English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He is the author of Signs Taken for Wonders, The Way of the World and Modern Epic, all from Verso.

Quite what Weltliteratur meant (to Goethe and his age) and what it means (or might mean) to us are still very live issues, if only for the reason that 'globalization', if it exits at all, is not a state of a process, something still in the making. Goethe's idea was itself cast in the form of a thought-experiment, a groping reach for a barely glimpsed future. ... By the same token, what we make of it today is necessarily open to indefinitely extended reflection and debate.