On the Concept of World Literature
Anders Pettersson
online guest lecture
6 April 2022 (Wednesday) at 14:00 CET

The expression “world literature” is currently being used in several ways: about various culturally and temporally inclusive bodies of literature and about various ways of studying such literature. In the lecture, special attention will be devoted to the editorial concept of world literature in The Cambridge History of World Literature (2021) edited by Debjani Ganguly. Formulations about world literature sometimes cast it as a mind-independent entity, sometimes as a scholarly construction. Anders Pettersson will argue that the choice between these alternatives is important, since it has significant consequences for the logic of thinking and reasoning about world literature.

Anders Pettersson is an emeritus professor of Swedish and comparative literature at Umeå University, Sweden. He has written broadly on fundamental literary theory, but also worked on issues in transcultural literary history. Besides articles and reviews in literary and philosophical scholarly journals he has published six monographs, the latest being The Idea of a Text and the Nature of Textual Meaning (John Benjamins, 2017), and six edited or co-edited collections, including Notions of Literature across Times and Cultures (editor; De Gruyter, 2006). He forms part of the collective of editors of the forthcoming four-volume Literature: A World History (Wiley-Blackwell, 2022), in which he is the macroregional editor for Europe and the editor of the first volume, about literatures before 200 CE.

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