Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability argues for a rethinking of comparative literature focusing on the problems that emerge when large-scale paradigms of literary studies ignore the politics of the "Untranslatable"--the realm of those words that are continually retranslated, mistranslated, transferred from language to language, or especially resistant to substitution.

In the place of "World Literature"--a dominant paradigm in the humanities, one grounded in market-driven notions of readability and universal appeal--Apter proposes a plurality of "world...