ABSTRACT
PASCALE CASANOVA (B. 1959) IS A French scholar and permanent visiting professor at Duke University who has also worked extensively with literature in radio broadcasting. Although she does not use the term world literature to describe the main interest of her work, her 1999 book La Republique mondiale des lettres (Eng. 2004 The World Republic of Letters ) was an early expression of the renewed interest in the theory of world literature, along with the work of David Damrosch and Franco Moretti. Where one of Damrosch’s main interests is to bring unknown works into conversation with the Western canon, and Moretti seeks to explain how genres, in particular the novel, infl uence other literatures, Casanova’s work can be said to adopt an intermediate position. Infl uenced by the work of both world systems theorist Immanuel Wallerstein and sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, and recognizing the many kinds of domination which take place between national literatures, she has described the breaches in the obvious channels of infl uence, for example by devoting much attention to writers from the semi-periphery of the major European literatures.
