World and Global lit.

       I've been mulling over the recent n + 1 opinion piece/article, World Lite -- on the idea (or rather, their idea) of 'world literature' (or 'global literature') -- but have had the hardest time coming to grips with it because it seems wrong-headed on so many levels. Nevertheless, here are a few stray, annoyed thoughts.
       At her Arabic Literature (in English) weblog M. Lynx Qualey has a bit of a go at it, in 'World Literature Certainly Sounds Like a Nice Idea' -- and notes the most glaring problem with the piece:

But that the essay comes almost entirely from the point of view of the Anglophone world makes it, all told, a very odd sort of worldliness. There is no discussion of different literary cultures, different literary and aesthetic values, or the weight placed on forms that have been most particularly developed among Global North-ish minorities.

       (Indeed, The Thousand and One Nights gets a mention, but otherwise the name- (and title-)dropping piece is devoid of any Arabic authors or books, for example -- though that's hardly the only lacuna to be found here.)
       This is also reflected in the n + 1 observation that:

The key institution in the creation of World Literature has not been the literary festival, or even the commercial publishing house, but the university. Every World Lit writer seems to have an appointment. Pamuk teaches at Columbia; Paul Muldoon at Princeton; Junot Díaz at MIT.

       They're not precise -- though their examples give it away: they mean the American university (with a few UK MFA programmes then thrown in for good measure): it is in the US that the 'international' writer has been put out to that odd pasture that is academia (or what passes as such in the US), making for a comfortable if removed-from-some-reality existence. Internationally, the writer is much less of a presence at the university; those who are professors in other countries tend to be actual academics (as opposed to American-style MFA lecturers and the like) -- and, indeed, even some foreign authors at universities in the US focus on other academic fields (Omega Minor-author Paul Verhaeghen is a professor of psychology; Johnny Mad Dog-author Emmanuel Dongala lists his academic areas of interest as: "Stereochemistry and asymetric syntheses, and envionmental toxicology" (the misspellings suggesting his editor draws a blank hereabouts)).
       The coddled ghettoization (that's what it amounts to) of the writer on campuses remains a distinctly (and bizarrely) American phenomenon -- and I don't think too much should be read into that (problematic though the situation is).
       At n + 1 they also grandly pronounce:

World Literature, in the form gestured at by Goethe and now canonized by the academy, has become an empty vessel for the occasional self-ratification of the global elite, who otherwise mostly ignore it.

       Fair enough, I suppose, if that's the definition you're going by -- but while Mohsin Hamid's How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia may be what they're talking about that's exactly the sort of novel that strikes me as more of an outlier -- certainly not 'world literature' in any way I conceive it (but rather something tailored very specifically to a very narrow (but, yes, broadly international) readership).
       They give a nod to Pascale Casanova's "pathbreaking World Republic of Letters", but seem to have taken the shift to English-language dominance too readily; I don't think it's anywhere near as pronounced as they suggest. Yes, English is the language everyone wants to (and tries to) get published in, and it's the language most of the authors communicate in at those literary festivals, but it's still not center-stage as far as the global literary world goes; that still strikes me as a more complex (and far more interesting than n + 1 make it out to be) beast.
       I'm also underwhelmed by their 'internationalist' turn -- the examples on offer also noteworthy for their English-language availability, and while some are of some specific interest ("Kirill Medvedev's rejection of copyright,") -- and many of these authors have written impressive works -- they really aren't the most impressive of examples. Indeed, to say: "Yan Lianke, unlike the Nobel-winning Mo Yan, has moved underground and gained in creative power" is really rather oversimplifying things -- with the Sandalwood Death-author engaged in literary approaches that are no less interesting and noteworthy than those of the author of Lenin's Kisses and Serve the People !.
       And, dear god, any piece that bandies about all these notions of 'world literature' and 'internationalist literature' and fails to even mention Juan Goytisolo -- a true exemplar of what I consider world lit -- demonstrates it's barely scratched the surface of the topic.
       Finally, some of the claims are just plain odd, such as:

Handke, such a late modernist that the party appears to have ended, is an Austrian who lives in Paris; but can you regularly identify the city or country his peripatetic characters are passing through, metafictional preoccupations in train ?

       Given the many works he has written with place names in their titles, given that his volume of collected essays 1967-2007 is titled Meine Ortstafeln Meine Zeittafeln (see the Suhrkamp publicty page), given the damn books, I'd have to say ... emphatically: yes.