ABSTRACT
This chapter first outlines a few theories in this transformative era that reflect on history and address the fundamental realities of our times, including Edgar Morin’s new complex thinking, Francois Jullien’s mutually subjective cognition, John Cobb’s constructive postmodernism, and Armando Gnisci’s redefining of literature and humanism. These theories or new inputs shed light on literature scholarship today, especially comparative literature and world literature. The chapter then offers a schematic, chronological account of the development of the Chinese conception of world literature and calls on the academic community to address emerging theoretical issues facing this world of ours where spiritual or cultural colonization are still stubbornly existent.
The world has entered an era of diversity and change. History is no longer an object of research presupposed as linear, orderly arranged, and with a fixed structure and ultimate significance, but an open text embodying infinite differences and diversity. It is like an ever-changing life that Foucault (1967) describes as “a network that connects points and intersects with its own skein” (pp. 22–27). This change has apparently laid a foundation for resisting cultural unipolarity and homogenization and for constructing an ideal multi-cultural global development, and has also provided a new perspective for literary research.
