%0 Book %A Jean Bessière %A Gerald Gillespie %D 2015 %C Bruxelles, Belgium %I Peter Lang Verlag %@ 1376-3202 %@ 9783035265545 %T Contextualizing World Literature %R 10.3726/978-3-0352-6554-5 %U https://www.peterlang.com/document/1053927 %X This book revisits the notion of World Literature and its applications in Comparative Literature. It suggests the notion not as a means to sift out international paradigms for reading literatures, but as a set of guidelines for the construction of interlocking and/or reciprocally illuminating multilingual literary clusters. These ensembles are of very diverse shapes: the world, a region, a country, a language block, a network of cross-cultural «interferences» – while the so-called minor literatures invite to question the use of these ensembles. Within this frame, fourteen essays respond to the basic paradox of World Literature: how may specific methodological and critical outlooks allow expression of the universal? The answers to this question can be arranged in three groups: 1. Recognition of the need to break loose from European or Western critical perspectives; 2. Presentation of macro- and microcosmic dimensions connectedness and its processes; 3. Definitions of the methodological efforts and hermeneutic orientations to be applied. %K World Literature, The notion: debates, relativization, applications. Minor Literatures and World Literatures, Multicultural and multilingual countries and %G English