ABSTRACT
World literature has become a subject of lively – sometimes heated – debate in recent years, both as a body of texts and as “a problem,” as Franco Moretti remarked in his influential pair of articles, “Conjectures on World Literature” and “More Conjectures”. But world literature is almost always experienced by readers within the national context in which they live, and more particularly within the national markets in which books are published, reviewed, and assigned in classes. Taken together, the multiplying reversals between consumer and consumed – Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortázar, narrator and axolotl, Kafka and Rilke, Paris and Buenos Aires – play out the shifting figure/ground reversals of the world and the nation that we can explore through the study of world literature in its local metamorphoses.
