Rethinking World Literature in the Age of AI

The debate about world literature has never stopped since the term was first introduced in a conversation between Goethe and his secretary almost two centuries ago, and it has intensified in the age of Al, which is bringing about changes in almost every aspect of society, including world literature. Specifically, while AI brings enormous benefits to the dissemination and translation of world literature, it also creates challenges and problems. Based on the analysis of the translation of literary texts across different cultures, this paper argues firstly that AI may contradict David Damrosch's claim that "world literature gains through translation," as world literature can in fact "lose" something, e.g. literariness, as the examples selected in this paper show, and secondly that AI can also provide a "biased" picture of theories or works from different cultures. We should therefore be wary of these two risks, otherwise we could be misled in this 'technological wave."