Reading the World, Reading the Self

This article is a reflection on the wordy and worldly characters of literary texts that invites us to focus on how their referentiality unfolds in the act of reading. The article focuses in particular on the necessity for world literature to factor in the subjective involvement of the reader entailed by literary communication. It does so by firstly revisiting the old debate about referentiality and contextualization of literary texts in literary studies, and specifically within world literature, which is particularly concerned with understanding the boundaries of literary communication. It then analyses how the worldly and wordy components of literature can be brought together by considering the act of reading as the core of meaning production and as a process of generative construction, which, when based on the interaction between readers and distant texts, like in the specific case of world literature, has the possibility to maximize its potential. Engaging with Iser's and Poulet's phenomenological approaches to the act of reading, the article argues against the vision of literary texts as transparent objects and encourages scholars working on world literature to embrace the translucency and generative potential that literature offers, inviting them to embrace aesthetic and anthropological perspectives so as to understand works of world literature as tools for interpretation both of the world and of ourselves.