ABSTRACT
When Susan Bassnett proclaimed in 1993 that “comparative literature is in one sense dead,” she was right—and wrong. She suggested, according to a recent book, Introducing Comparative Literature by a trio of scholars from both sides of the Atlantic, Cesar Dominguez, Haun Saussy and Darío Villanueva, that this was due to “English literature’s replacement of literary theory in American universities, the impact of cultural studies” and other institutional reasons. An irreverent and unashamedly Marxist companion piece to Emily Apter’s book could be the editorial “World-Lite” in an issue of n+1 appropriately titled “The Evil Issue.” The historic rival to a World Literature made up of individual national authors was the programmatically internationalist literature of the revolutionary left: journalism, treatises, and speeches, novels, poetry, plays, and memoirs necessarily written in a given vernacular but always aimed at a borderless audience of radicals.
