ABSTRACT
In the United States world literature has, since the beginning of the twentieth century, been taught at university level. The reasons for this are to be sought in the specific organization of US secondary and higher education. World literature courses were seen as furnishing new university students with some basic knowledge of their European cultural and literary heritage – knowledge it was found these students were lacking, at variance with their European counterparts. Especially in the first half of the century, such courses often took the form of “Great Books” courses. Although courses in world literature and in Great Books originated with comparative literature departments, they quickly, and for reasons connected with the pressure of numbers, migrated to English departments. All reading in world literature classes was in translation. World literature courses remained at an introductory level. They typically relied on massive anthologies, arranged along chronological or thematic lines, and often gathering numerous short works or excerpts from longer works. For all these reasons world literature classes eventually came to be looked down upon by comparative literature departments. This was especially the case after WWII. During the 1980s and the so-called “culture wars” in the United States, academic world literature courses came under heavy attack because of their historical bias toward European literature. This eventually led to major changes in the material included in world literature courses, and in the anthologies serving them. At the end of the twentieth century, and very explicitly after the turn of the millennium, world literature was reclaimed by comparative literature departments, but its teaching, both as to content and method, led to heated debate. The latter focused most explicitly on whether world literature courses inherently served to confirm and project American hegemony around the world, or whether they might serve to relativize it.
