Circulation and World-Systems of Literature
How does a text become world literature? Two influential answers focus on circulation — the movement and reception of works across cultures — and on world-systems, which map the literary field as a structured, unequal space of centers and peripheries.
Definition
The study of how literary works move and gain value across cultures, modeled either as flexible circulation and reception or as a structured world-system with dominant centers and dependent peripheries.
Scope
Treats the models that explain the transnational life of literature: Damrosch's account of world literature as circulation and reading; Moretti's and Casanova's adaptation of world-systems thinking, derived from Wallerstein, to literary form and prestige; and the resulting picture of an uneven global literary space. Concerns the mechanisms of travel, translation, and consecration rather than the content of any one tradition.
Core questions
- By what routes and mechanisms do texts circulate beyond their origins?
- Is the world literary field a single system, and is it equal or hierarchical?
- How does literary prestige get produced and consecrated internationally?
- How do forms and genres travel from centers to peripheries, and with what local transformations?
Key theories
- World literature as circulation
- Damrosch located world literature in the movement and active reception of works beyond their culture of origin, arguing that texts often gain rather than simply lose in translation.
- Literary world-system
- Adapting Wallerstein's world-systems theory, Moretti described a single but unequal world literature in which the novel form spreads as a compromise between imported Western form and local material.
- World republic of letters
- Casanova mapped an international literary space structured by competition for prestige, with consecrating centers such as Paris functioning as a literary 'Greenwich meridian' against which value is measured.
History
World-systems thinking entered literary study when Moretti's 2000 essay and Casanova's work of the late 1990s and early 2000s adapted Wallerstein's 1974 model of an unequal capitalist world-economy to the global literary field. Damrosch's 2003 circulation-based account offered a more pluralistic alternative, and the two strands — systemic and circulatory — have framed subsequent debate over the structure of world literature.
Debates
- Structured system versus flexible circulation
- Whether world literature is governed by a determinate, unequal core-periphery system or is better described as a more open, contingent process of circulation and reception.
Key figures
- David Damrosch
- Franco Moretti
- Pascale Casanova
- Immanuel Wallerstein
Related topics
Seminal works
- damrosch2003
- casanova2004
- moretti2000
- wallerstein1974
Frequently asked questions
- What is a literary world-system?
- It is a model, adapted from Wallerstein's economic world-systems theory, that treats world literature as one interconnected but unequal space in which dominant centers set the terms of literary value and forms travel outward to peripheries, where they are locally transformed.