World against Globe: Toward a Normative Conception of World Literature

Recent theories of world literature (Casanova, Damrosch and Moretti) have obscured its normative dimension because they have only understood the world in terms of spatial circulation, the paradigmatic case of which is global capitalist market exchange. This essay offers a critical analysis of the limitations of the recent revival of world literature. It outlines an alternative temporal understanding of the world as the normative basis for a radical rethinking of what “world literature” signifies and develops a normative account of world literature as an active power of world-making that contests the world made by capitalist globalization.