“The Nomos of World Literature”
8 July
Presented in Part 2 of the Panel “Constructing ‘Worlds of Literature'”, moderated by Dustin Breitenwischer and Samira Spatzek. 17:00 – 19:30 (Berlin time).
The discourse of world literature—whether it arises in criticism, publishing, or distribution—is at base typically normative in nature, that is, it seeks to bring about the literary world that it claims merely to describe. This paper suggests some ways of thinking about this normative element in connection with “the nomos of the earth,” Carl Schmitt’s concept of the Eurocentric order of the world from the fifteenth to the twentieth centuries. It argues that it is not an accident that the projects of literary internationalism that are historically erased in the contemporary revival of world literature discourse—Popular Front social realism or “Bandung” literary humanism—were precisely modes of challenging this Eurocentered ordering of the world.
Introduction by Samira Spatzek, Postdoctoral Researcher RA 1 “Competing Communities”
Born and raised in Karachi, Pakistan, Aamir R. Mufti is Professor of Comparative Literature at UCLA. He is the author, most recently, of Forget English! Orientalisms and World Literatures (Harvard University Press). He is presently completing a book project called Edward Said in Jerusalem.
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