Miller begins this chapter with a fairly sharp dialogical differentiation between what he says about globalization and world literature and what Ranjan Ghosh says in his chapter 5. Miller holds that a special theory should be derived in each case from the terminology of the text at hand in light of its specific, surrounding, historical, biographical, and linguistic context. World literature’s time has certainly come again in the current development of a new discipline called world literature suitable for a time of globalization. The new discipline faces some challenges, however: the challenge of translation, the challenge of what literary works to choose as representative, the challenge of making a universal definition of literature. Explaining the reasons for Nietzsche’s rejection in The Birth of Tragedy of Goethe’s Weltliteratur, when that rejection is put into the context of The Birth of Tragedy as a whole and of other writing by Nietzsche, is a good example of the theoretical problems that the renewed discipline of world literature will need to take into account.
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Contents
Thinking Literature across Continents
Ranjan Ghosh teaches in the Department of English, University of North Bengal, and is the author of, most recently,
J. Hillis Miller is UCI Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Irvine and the author of, most recently,
Ranjan Ghosh teaches in the Department of English, University of North Bengal, and is the author of, most recently,
J. Hillis Miller is UCI Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Irvine and the author of, most recently,
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