Information, Medium & Society: Twenty-second International Conference on Publishing Studies

Abstract

I interrogate the idea of the ‘world’ in World Literature. In this regard I take some formulations and put them under close scrutiny; World Literature in English is an ideologically driven project. It is World Literature but it contradicts itself, how it is world when it is presented only in English? Why is a national literature asked to erase its linguistic boundary and become one with English to be a part of World Literature? Why there is no journal on World Literature in any other language? Why should the idea of World Literature be aligned with English only (as if English is the language of the world)? This leads to a cosmopolitan provincialism where as I would like to talk about a vernacular cosmopolitanism, which forms the original idea of World Literature. So, there is already a contradiction, there is also a hegemony. I interrogate this hegemonic element by examining World Literature in other languages of the world, with particular reference to some publishing initiatives introducing World Literature as Biswa Sahitya in a non-world language, Odia. This is a major attempt to create World Literature in a provincial language that interrogates the idea of World Literature in English.