I stake out a contemporary context in which democracy seems to be under attack from the populist right, and neglected by parts of the progressive left caught up with a politics of the personal. In a polarised world, persuading others to change their sense of who they are has become more difficult. I draw on Jonathan Haidt to show how most decisions are made on the basis of emotion rather than reason. Hannah Arendt and Chantal Mouffe argue for the importance of public argument and the theatricality of political life, prioritising social roles over personal authenticity. From a liberal perspective, Judith Shklar speaks to the inevitability of hypocrisy in democratic politics. Matthew Flinders, Alan Finlayson and David Runciman are contemporary theorists who identify the need for political science to take on the problem of rhetoric. From truth and hypocrisy, I turn to the question of representation. A democratic politician represents those who vote for her or him much as an actor in a play represents a character. Theatre offers a lens through which to contemplate problems of selfhood and identity, and the paradox of the sincere liar.

The epilogue surveys contemporary global fiction and alternate conceptions of world literature to stress the political, historical contingency of the Anglophone ambition to give formal literary expression to totality. Unlike their late modern predecessors, Italo Calvino, Jorge Luis Borges, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie delegate the task of crafting literary totalities to their readers, suggesting that one’s best chance of assimilating the world through text lies not in devouring a splendiferous Gesamtkunstwerk but in grazing across many national literatures. Recent trends suggest a privatization of world-making responsibilities; authors no longer claim the public function of rendering the world legible for their readerships, at least not within single works. I proceed from self-reflexive meditations on world literature in Calvino, Borges, and Adichie to explore the literary market in South Korea, where publishing houses have stayed solvent thanks to the evergreen demand for collectible sets of foreign literature in translation. Unlike the writers I examine in previous chapters, non-Anglophone writers frequently assume that the world is an entity to be read rather than written.