Towards a Spectral Theory of World Literature

Abstract

In the Introduction, I provide a detailed exposition of my spectral theory of world literature. After discussing the parameters of the contemporary world literature debate, I then seek to redress what I note has been its general lack of attention to the concept of “literature” on which Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s and Karl Marx’s original formulations of a “world literature” were founded. I outline a genealogy of this concept that traces it back to the conditions of European society in the early 19th century, and on these grounds suggest that global capitalist modernity be identified as the repressed origin and condition of possibility of world literature. From here, I proceed to elaborate on the historical constitution of world literature with reference to world-systems analysis, Orientalism, and the theory of spectrality. I argue that premised on their superseding of alternate global practices and modalities of “literature” and “the literary” in modernity, yet always-already haunted by these, world literature and its forms – the novel, the lyric poem, and the stage play – are constituted in the logic of spectrality. To flesh out this argument, I demonstrate the spectral infection and inflection of the novel form itself as initiated by Miguel de Cervantes.