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World Literature Today: From the Old World to the Whole World

No shift in literary studies over the past generation has been greater than the opening up of the canon from a focus on a relatively restricted core of masterpieces to the expansive multicultural landscape so evident today. The tremendous widening of our literary horizons, in turn, is nowhere more evident than in the field of world literature, which until recently usually meant "Western European" literature, but which now seems to encompass everything from the earliest Sumerian poetry to the most recent fictional experiments of the Tibetan postmodernists Zhaxi Dawa and Jamyang Norbu. Wholly laudable in principle, this rapid expansion poses exceptional difficulties in practice. Just how is this great wealth of material to be made accessible to readers? What classic texts will have to be dropped in order to make room for the new arrivals within the physical and temporal boundaries of courses and anthologies? What cultural context needs to be provided - and what cultural context can feasibly be provided -for non-specialists to have meaningful encounters with African orature, Japanese renga, and Mozarabic kharjas? How are all these works to be read alongside Petrarch and Wallace Stevens, always assuming that both of these latter authors still remain on the syllabus? The fact is that these questions have yet to be answered in any satisfactory way, as a look at several recent world literature anthologies will show. These problems are not actually new: the expansion of the canon only brings into sharp relief a number of tensions that have long existed within the idea of "world literature" as it has been formulated over the course of the past century. We won't do better in presenting the newly expansive world of world literature until we do a better job of clarifying just what we mean to accomplish by presenting "the literature" of "the world" for a contemporary American audience. I will begin, then, by discussing some earlier efforts to create anthologies of