TY - JOUR A1 - Pittel, Harald T1 - Fin du globe BT - Oscar Wilde’s romance with decadence and the idea of world literature JF - Thesis eleven : critical theory and historical sociology N2 - This essay argues that Oscar Wilde noticeably contributed to the emerging discourse about world literature, even though his views in this regard have to be unearthed from the margins of his works, from his early and unpublished American lectures and 'between the lines' of his major critical essays. Wilde's implicit ideas around world literature can be understood as being closely related to his broader endeavour of redirecting and revaluing the pejorative discourse around 'decadence' in art and literature. More specifically, the arch-aesthete preferred to use the word 'romance' rather than 'decadence' (a term he hardly used at all in his writings), signalling a sensitivity attuned to what he called the 'love of things impossible'. This reconceptualization of the decadent outlook was to inspire a critical ideal of literature which relied on creatively activating the other as Other, culminating in a vision of intersubjective, transcultural and unlimited literary communication. Wilde's thought can be more specifically understood as anticipating central tenets of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's evocations of the planetary, thus preparing the way for an alterity-oriented understanding of literary cosmopolitanism. KW - debt KW - decadence KW - planetarity KW - romance KW - world literature Y1 - 2021 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1177/0725513621994702 SN - 0725-5136 SN - 1461-7455 VL - 162 IS - 1 SP - 121 EP - 136 PB - Sage CY - London ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Wiemann, Dirk T1 - Being Taught Something World-Sized BT - 'The Detainee's Tale as Told to Ali Smith and the Work of World Literature T2 - The Work of World Literature N2 - This paper reads ‘The Detainee’s Tale as told to Ali Smith’ (2016) as an exemplary demonstration of the work of world literature. Smith’s story articulates an ethics of reading that is grounded in the recipient’s openness to the singular, unpredictable, and unverifiable text of the other. More specifically, Smith’s account enables the very event that it painstakingly stages: the encounter with alterity and newness, which is both the theme of the narrative and the effect of the text on the reader. At the same time, however, the text urges to move from an ethics of literature understood as the responsible reception of the other by an individual reader to a more explicitly convivial and political ethics of commitment beyond the scene of reading. KW - Ali Smith KW - anagogy KW - ethics KW - Refugee Tales KW - singularity KW - world literature Y1 - 2021 SN - 978-3-96558-011-4 SN - 978-3-96558-012-1 SN - 978-3-96558-013-8 SN - 978-3-96558-022-0 U6 - https://doi.org/10.37050/ci-19_07 SN - 2627-728X SN - 2627-731X VL - 2021 SP - 149 EP - 172 PB - ICI Berlin Press CY - Berlin ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Wiemann, Dirk ED - Robinson, Benjamin Lewis T1 - Being Taught Something World-Sized BT - 'The Detainee's Tale as Told to Ali Smith' and the Work of World Literature JF - The Work of World Literature N2 - This paper reads ‘The Detainee’s Tale as told to Ali Smith’ (2016) as an exemplary demonstration of the work of world literature. Smith’s story articulates an ethics of reading that is grounded in the recipient’s openness to the singular, unpredictable, and unverifiable text of the other. More specifically, Smith’s account enables the very event that it painstakingly stages: the encounter with alterity and newness, which is both the theme of the narrative and the effect of the text on the reader. At the same time, however, the text urges to move from an ethics of literature understood as the responsible reception of the other by an individual reader to a more explicitly convivial and political ethics of commitment beyond the scene of reading. KW - Ali Smith KW - anagogy KW - ethics KW - Refugee Tales KW - singularity KW - world literature Y1 - 2021 U6 - https://doi.org/10.37050/ci-19_07 SN - 2627-728X SN - 2627-731X SP - 149 EP - 172 PB - ICI Press CY - Berlin ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Gasser, Lucy T1 - Towards Eurasia BT - remapping Europe as ‘upstart peripheral to an ongoing operation’ JF - Postcolonial Studies N2 - In order to heed the call in world literature studies to work against disciplinary Eurocentrism by refiguring both what constitutes world literature and how this is read, in this article I propose world literature as an archive of world-making practices and as an impulse for the articulation of alternative methodological approaches. This takes world literature from the postcolonial South as, following Pheng Cheah, instantiating a modality of world literature in which the need for imagining worlds with alternative centres to those determined by coloniality is particularly acute. A response to this is facilitated and illustrated by a reading of Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore’s Letters from Russia (1930), and South African writer/activist Alex La Guma’s A Soviet Journey (1978). By drawing forward connections between the postcolonial South and the former Soviet Union, this complicates traditional colonial arrangements of the colonial ‘centre’ as cradle of civilisation and culture, as well as postcolonial scholarship’s cumulative fetishisation of ‘Europe’, by allowing a reshuffling of the co-ordinates determining ‘centres’ and ‘peripheries’ and a more nuanced grasp of ‘Europe’ simultaneously. These imaginative journeys destabilise ‘Europe’ as closed category and call forth Eurasia as a more appropriate categorical–cartographical framework for thinking this space and the connections and (hi)story-telling it stages and fosters. KW - Eurasia KW - Europe KW - Eurocentrism KW - Soviet Union KW - world literature Y1 - 2019 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1080/13688790.2019.1608798 SN - 1368-8790 SN - 1466-1888 VL - 22 IS - 2 SP - 188 EP - 202 PB - Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group CY - Abingdon ER -