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Regionalizing the Planet: Horizons of the Introverted Novel at World Literature's End

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Taylor A. Eggan
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Abstract

“World literature” will always fail because there is no such thing as the world. I draw on speculative realism to elaborate how all formations of a single world literature stem from problematic world concepts (particularly “the globe”) that write certain literary traditions out of the world. Using Gayatri Spivak's concept of the planetary, I move toward a mode of reading that attends to how individual texts regionalize the planet vis-à-vis their own centers of production. Instead of imagining a single world sectioned into center and periphery, this method recognizes that, far from dwelling on their own marginalization within the global economy, all localities (and literatures) posit themselves as center and regionalize outward from this center. Reading for regionalization pluralizes the possibilities of literary worlding. This practice requires us to understand and to honor the formal character of introversion, which I theorize through the case of the Swahili novel.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 131 , Issue 5: Special Topic: Literature in the World , October 2016 , pp. 1299 - 1315
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2016

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