Though literature is not a technology, the
historical models literary scholars use to describe
literary history owe a great deal to the languages of
originality, novelty, progress, and invention that core
of the idea of technological development. No real
surprise: putting progress at the center of historicity
is one of the things that makes us moderns. But if you
think like a modern person then it's very hard to ever
really make a good case for why someone interested in
the history of modern literary aesthetics ought to read
the literature of the non-Western world. On Literary
Worlds makes that case. It does so by rethinking from
the ground up our concepts of literary history and
progress, redescribing the history we know (or think we
know) in a new language that requires us to be far more
worldly and global in our arguments about literary
change. To do, so, the book begins with an argument that
literature is a world-creating activity. If that is
true, then a number of scientific and economic
discourses (globalization, e.g.) often considered as in
some way outside of or "beyond" literature ought instead
to be thought of as coeval with it, as partners in
humanity's ongoing attempts to think about the nature of
the world. The book reads those attempts as
"cosmographies" whose social force, measured against the
scientific, geographic, and philosophical history of
world-concepts, shapes the "physics" of the socially
possible. This theory of the cosmographical imagination
leads to a claim that thinking worldedness revises
existing models of literary history. Connecting the
cosmographical imagination to the historical shifts in
world-view caused by the Columbian discoveries and
Copernican revolutions, On Literary Worlds shows how the
very notion of the modern is, at heart, a cosmographical
social form. The book does, therefore, three things: (1)
it develops a vocabulary for the description of
aesthetic worlds; (2) using that vocabulary, it rewrites
the history of literature of the last 400 years; and (3)
it criticizes the ways in which the institutional
structures of literary study distort or limit our
capacity to think about historical time.
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