ABSTRACT
This book engages with the dialogue between postcolonial and world literature approaches in order to compare the tensions between the “national” and “worldly” imaginaries of the novel genre and insist on the political imperative of teaching world literature. This chapter suggests a reading approach by which non-Western literature, here, Egyptian literature as a case in point, can be brought into comparative discussion with European literature to supplement postcolonial paradigms. The introduction problematises the understanding that the novel has mirrored the nation consistently since the genre first appeared. Instead, the novel is transnational at its inception, and shows a narrator’s attempt to come to terms with three often conflicting, always interweaving variables: individual, nation (or political community) and world (whether geographical or conceptual). Yet undercutting the theoretical discussion is a concern about the pedagogical impact of literature in contexts of global academic uncertainty, from downsized departments to living in authoritarian and underprivileged contexts. How does canonising world literature relate in any way to some local societal, political or academic reform, whether in First or Third Worlds? What is the point of teaching literature in this particular place for a particular scholar?
