world literature canon

Syllable breakdown

Dictionary meaning

the contested set of literary works from multiple linguistic and cultural traditions that are regarded as essential reading for a global literary education, and the critical debates surrounding which texts are included, on what criteria, and whose cultural authority determines these selections; the concept of world literature — Weltliteratur — originates with Goethe, who in 1827 envisioned a future in which national literary traditions would be in productive dialogue, but contemporary scholars including Pascale Casanova, Franco Moretti, and David Damrosch have interrogated the power dynamics that determine which texts travel from periphery to centre, which languages command translation, and how translation itself transforms the works it transmits; the world literature canon is criticised for over-representing European and North American texts in translation while marginalising the vast literary production of Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean that does not circulate in the languages of dominant publishing markets