12 - Joyce and world literature

Summary

Is it possible to talk about literary history from a planetary perspective? Not the literary history of a single country or continent, but one that accounts for the production and reception of literature across five continents over the course of a 2,500 year period? Who, after all, would feel comfortable working with so many different literary genres in hundreds of different languages even if they were in translation? Once you begin to imagine the literary field as a multimillenial global phenomenon, the effects can be dizzying. Many who know a great deal about the history of the novel in England, France or the United States, for instance, would be hard pressed to explain what happened in China, Chile, Nigeria, Brazil, Japan and India. In the past fifty years, literary critics have been trained to limit, not expand, the geographical horizons of their research. And though globalisation has made the world seem smaller, our critical perspectives do not have to follow suit. Instead, they should be even wider, more accommodating and open to the fact that literature is involved in a complex network of local and global processes.

World literature is not a clearly defined field with a single methodology, canon and readymade vocabulary. In fact, we might say more accurately that it is a hotly contested possibility for literary study that involves critics with a variety of different interests. The debate about world literature has gained serious momentum in the past decade, but Joyce has not garnered much attention.