ABSTRACT
As David Damrosch writes in his riposte to Emily Apter’s trashing of the World Literature enterprise, Against World Literature, “The world is a large and various place”. World Literature as practiced risks shrinking that world into a small and monotonous place, grayed over by Theorization and metronomed by an unhealthy and distorting obsession with a handful of texts, pseudo-historical moments and critics. As Theo D’haen points out in his essential Routledge Concise History of World Literature, differences between American and Western European practices of World Literature stem from their divergent locations. The source of World Literature in American universities is pedagogical, a result of the resistance to specialization that characterizes undergraduate education in the United States. In Western Europe, especially France and Germany, there is little impetus to think about teaching World Literature, so its practice is instead theoretical and research-driven.
