Both Apter’s book and “World Lite” are deliberately provocative. Yet while some objections to these works did emerge (see Rajaram and Griffith; Levine), their basic arguments were not substantially refuted, perhaps because they appeal to what is already a consensus position. The general story—a story about world literature as a product saturated by commercial and institutional pressures—has proven quite popular, such that today it seems that world literature is widely understood, as I have been describing, as a niche commercial category serving relatively elite consumers’ desires to be exposed to exotic or simply unusual experiences or even just to have their own biases confirmed. These privileged consumers either read world literature in such a way that its contrapuntal or oppositional tendencies are effectively muted, or the work is from the get go written in a style that is meant to allow for the accumulation of acclaim and prestige and little else.
Furthermore, the existence of a niche market for works of world literature is thought to have, as a result, real implications for literary form. The writing is “born-translated,” in Rebecca Walkowitz’s terms, in that works of contemporary world literature “anticipate their own future in several literary geographies” (174). It wants to be read across borders, it wants to be included in lucrative international translation rights deals, it wants to be understood by people all around the world—people with the requisite cultural capital, that is—and it wants to be adapted for film. Complexities of style and language are deemphasized; the writing is flat; plot dominates. While not all scholars are particularly dismayed by this state of affairs—Walkowitz, for instance, is interested in simply charting formal innovations, and is indeed even wary of the notion that this writing is somehow degraded—much of the recent commentary does have an oppositional tone.
For Apter and for the n+1 editors, certainly, world literature signifies easily consumed works from which progressive scholars should be distancing themselves. As Gloria Fisk argues in her review of Apter’s book, it becomes a crucial construct against which they define and defend another kind of literary writing that deliberately resists being easily accommodated by the market, along with a style of critique that values instead what cannot be easily translated and traded. Fisk suggests that both Apter and the n+1 piece construct as much as they identify their object: they present world literature as “politically naive, theoretically unenlightened, and crucially caught up in the business of making money” because they want to celebrate themselves and their audiences in flattering contrast. For Apter the work to be celebrated is that which is finally untranslatable. For the n+1 editors what is worthy of promotion is an internationalist literature which would, unlike world literature, embrace the idea that it has an oppositional project and avowed truth to put forward: “Global Lit tends to accept as given the tastes of an international middlebrow audience,” they write, whereas “internationalism, by contrast, seeks to create the taste by which it is to be enjoyed. The difference, crudely, is between a product and a project.
interesting topic