ABSTRACT
For Goethe, who introduced the term Weltliteratur to Europe, world literature was a flexible and evolving system that comprised the literary production of all the world’s civilizations, ranging from the Chinese novel to the Serbian epic. Hence, world literature’s claim to methodological superiority over the study of national tradition is an epistemological one that relies on the relative advantage afforded by multiple points of view. Existing theories of world literature tend to characterize world literature with reference to a set of predefined canons that circulate across spaces defined and constituted by the Euro-American academy, even when they are not already internal to it. Deepening the relationship between world literature and translation studies can enable world literature to develop more critical and self-reflexive ways of representing the heterogeneity of global literary form. As F. Moretti notes, world literature has the potential to reverse “the received historical explanation” of the relation between source and translation in the context of unequal literary relations.
