ABSTRACT
The new world literature, which has shifted away from the field's old centre in Europe and therefore also away from its old origin in classical Greece, has done so in large part because of its sensitivity to its own historical context, which is of course postcolonial. The case for literary autonomy that underlies Beecroft's ambitious and indeed unrivalled synthesis has its true centre in the nation-state. It seems worth generalising this logic to world literature as a whole, at least as a hypothesis: it is the nation-state that organises the field, but it does so negatively. History in almost any extra-literary sense would have been an inconvenience. Ironically, literary critics who reach out to the new world history often seem to do so in the belief that they can thereby escape from history altogether. The history implicit in Wai Chee Dimock's set of assumptions is pleasantly self-serving for literary critics and impossibly bleak for everyone else.
