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Vernacular Cosmopolitanism in Anglophone World Literatures: Comparative Histories of Literary Worlding

  • Birgit Neumann EMAIL logo
Published/Copyright: November 6, 2018
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Abstract

The article explores the concept and practice of world literature from the perspective of postcolonial Anglophone literature. To account for the agency of literature and to move beyond the old centre/periphery model, the contribution focuses on literary acts of worldmaking rather than on the circulation of literature across the globe. It is argued that Anglophone world literature thrives on a poetics that bind diverse literary histories, languages, and distinct creative practices into patterns of exchange and thus exposes the constitutive exteriority within European (literary) histories. The use of the vernacular is identified as a central element of world literature’s poetics, staging a conflictual interplay between transcultural relationality and the formative impact of locality. As the vernacular binds the global and the local into loops of relation, it also offers an opportunity to consider the classification of “language as a language” (Young 1209). A reading of Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners (1956) provides insights into literary ways of worldmaking, showing how the poetics of Anglophone world literature shuttles among several places to create a vernacular cosmopolitanism (Bhabha). Finally, the article examines how an understanding of world literature as a polycentric network emerging from different literary traditions changes our practice of comparative literary history.

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Published Online: 2018-11-06
Published in Print: 2018-10-29

© 2018 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Frontmatter
  2. Frontmatter
  3. Introduction: Delocalizing European Literatures
  4. A Challenge to Global Literary History: The Case of World War I
  5. Vernacular Cosmopolitanism in Anglophone World Literatures: Comparative Histories of Literary Worlding
  6. Heterogeneic Time: An Anachronistic and Transcultural Rethinking of Eurochronology
  7. On Writing a Comparative Literary History: Delocalizing Minor Literatures in European Languages in the Age of ‘Big Data’
  8. Contributions
  9. Silence / Signification Degree Zero: Walter Benjamin’s Anti-Aesthetic of the Body
  10. Barthes liest Baudelaire und Mallarmé: Der Jahrmarkt als Mythos des Alltags
  11. The (Forgotten) Significance of Interchapters in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath: From Tenancy to Seasonal Migrant Farm Labor
  12. “Reopening the Grave”: Reading Trauma and Abjection in Hibakusha Poetry
  13. Die Iberische Halbinsel im frühen Mittelalter: Ausgangspunkt für interkulturelle Kontakte zwischen den Ottonen und den andalusischen Muslimen
  14. Review
  15. Dorothea von Mücke: The Practices of the Enlightenment: Aesthetics, Authorship, and the Public. New York: Columbia UP, 2015. 320 pp.
  16. Lama Jabb: Oral and Literary Continuities in Modern Tibetan Literature: The Inescapable Nation. London: Lexington Books, 2015. 277 pp.
  17. Sarga Moussa et Serge Zenkine, dir. : L’Imaginaire raciologique en France et en Russie, XIXe–XXesiècles. Lyon : Presses universitaires de Lyon (Littérature et idéologies), 2018. 205 pp.
  18. Massimo Cacciari: The Witholding Power: An Essay on Political Theology. Trans. Edi Pucci. London: Bloomsbury, 2018. 240 pp.
  19. Review: Reihe Literatur und Politik
  20. Branislav Jakovljević: Alienation Effects. Performance and Self-Management in Yugoslavia, 1945–91. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2016. 382 pp.
  21. Review: Reihe Wieder gelesen
  22. André Jolles: Simple Forms. Trans. Peter J. Schwartz. Foreword by Fredric Jameson. London and New York: Verso, 2017. 230 pp.
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