Four perspectives on world literature

reader, producer, text and system

Matthias Freise

pp. 191-205

in: Weigui Fang (ed), Tensions in world literature, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018

Abstract

Matthias Freise emphasizes that we should perceive world literature as a field of tensions and not as a set of texts. Therefore, examining it should start from the dynamics of these tensions on their four levels of reader, producer, text and system, which Freise explores successively. For readers, world literature appears mainly as a quantity, but readers should imagine its wide scope not by vainly accumulating quantity, but by transgressing deeply into foreign semantic worlds. For writers, world literature appears as a problem of language or of ideology. The latter is demonstrated by deconstructing David Damrosch's essay on Pavić's Dictionary of the Khazars. As a text, world literature appears as a microcosm, and as a system, it serves the internalization of external conflicts into a semantic field.

Cited authors

Damrosch David

Freise Matthias