ABSTRACT
David Damrosch has also pointed to the reflexive “meta” dimension of World Literature, seeing it less as a fixed canon of works than “a mode of circulation and of reading” and as “multiple windows on the world.” “World Literature” in some ways occupies the functional slot of Matthew Arnold’s “best that has been thought and written.” Marxist currents also enter the World Literature field through figures such as Franco Moretti. Building on Braudel and the Annales School idea of a world economy as well as on later dependency theory, Moretti’s “world-systems” model draws on the Marxist-inflected thought of such figures as Andre Gunder Frank and core/periphery and world-systems theory of Emmanuel Wallerstein and Samir Amin. 1970s Dependency theory was sometimes accused of a kind of left Prometheanism which saw the Global North as the all-powerful Prime Mover of world events and the Global South as passive worshipper at the Altar of the Global Center.
