2 Comparative Literature and World Literature: From Goethe to Globalization
3 The Location of World Literature
4 Frames for World Literature
5 World Literature and the Encounter with the Other: A Means or a Menace?
6 Some Remarks on the Concept of World Literature After 2000
7 World Literature, Canon, and Literary Criticism
8 Four Perspectives on World Literature: Reader, Producer, Text and System
9 A World of Translation
10 World Literature in Graphic Novels and Graphic Novels as World Literature
11 Experiments in Cultural Connectivity: Early Twentieth-Century German-Jewish Thought Meets the Daodejing
12 Ideographic Myth and Misconceptions about Chinese Poetic Art
13 Chinese Literature as Part of World Literature
14 How to Become World Literature: Chinese Literature’s Aspiration and Way to “Step into the World”
15 World Literature from and in China
Dialogue Section A: World Literature and Nation Building
Dialogue Section B: The Interactions between the Local and the Universal: A Few Thoughts after Listening to the Talk of Professor Damrosch
Dialogue Section C: World Literature: Significance, Challenge, and Future
Dialogue Section D: Who Decides the “United Nations of Great Books”: Inspired by Prof. Zhang’s Speech
Dialogue Section E: Response
Weigui Fang is Distinguished Professor at the School of Chinese Language and Literature, Beijing Normal University, China. He is Changjiang Scholar and Director of the Center for Literature and the History of Ideas at BNU. As an internationally acclaimed comparatist, his research is focused on Comparative Literature, modern Chinese culture and literature, History of Concepts, Sociology of Literature, and international sinology. He has authored 8 books and published more than 100 scholarly papers.
This collection gives a diversified account of world literature, examining not only the rise of the concept, but also problems such as the relation between the local and the universal, and the tensions between national culture and global ethics. In this context, it focuses on the complex relationship between Chinese literature and world literature, not only in the sense of providing an exemplary case study, but also as an introspection and re-location of Chinese literature itself. The book activates the concept of world literature at a time when it is facing the rising modern day challenges of race, class and culture.