ABSTRACT
The growth and expansion of world literature and of its subcategories are so perfectly timed against the shrinkage and redeployment of theory as to cause to suspect a causal relationship. There are two possibilities for this: world literature killed theory; or theory was killed by the same cultural forces that are causing world literature to thrive. By the mid-1990s, the who’s-afraid-of-world-literature attitude, as well as the embargo on literature in translation, had disappeared from official discourse, only to resurface in Emily Apter’s critique of world literature. Apter’s critique of world literature. Apter’s pierre de touche is the Vocabulaire européen des philosophies: Dictionnaire des intraduisibles, under the direction of Barbara Cassin. The earliest American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) reports on the discipline of comparative literature – the so-called Levin and Greene Reports – discouraged comparatists’ use of translations in teaching and research, which of course also put a damper on attempts at apprehending world literature.
