Paulo de Medeiros
World-Literature, Crisis, Resistance
Comparative Literature, the overarching discipline under which the field known as World Literature falls, was from crisis, exile, and resistance, and still remains defined by them. World Literature, although it has necessarily expanded the range of texts to be considered well beyond the central, largely European, literatures, paradoxically has also tended to enhance the canonical function of some texts. This, I suggest, neutralises the founding notion of crisis, risks sanitising and dismissing all the history of suffering and struggle inherent in many of the same texts, and leads to the erasure of the very notion of periphery used to legitimise the field. I propose to view World-Literature (as in Wallerstein’s World-Systems Theory) drawing on the work of the Warwick Research Collective to emphasise World-Literature’s potential for resistance. Some texts that will be mentioned include Kafka’s ‘In the Penal Colony’, Damon Glagut’s The Promise, and Adania Shibli’s, Minor Detail.
Paulo de Medeiros
is Professor of Modern and Contemporary World Literature and Head of the English and Comparative Literary Studies programme at the University of Warwick. He was Associate Professor at Bryant College (USA) and Professor at Utrecht University (Netherlands) before moving to Warwick. In 2011–2012 he was Keeley Fellow at Wadham College, Oxford, and in 2013–2014 President of the American Portuguese Studies Association. Hiis recent publications include a co-edited volume on Contemporary Lusophone Film: Transnational Communities and Alternative Communities (Routledge, 2021) and another on Postcolonial Theory & Crisis (De Gruyter, 2024)