The Cultural Basis of Twenty-First-Century World Order: From World Literature to World Literatures

Can world literature become the unifying basis of world order? If this dream, implicit in the project of a world literature, might seem to be impossibly utopian, it also outlines a long-term project of global transformation, whose attractiveness stems from the link to a larger process of globalization. For the idea of a unified global culture that “world literature” presages seems at first glance to coincide with the development of a world history, which is to say, of a global history made possible by the European circumnavigation of the globe.1 This global history still did not include the whole world,…