On Literary Worlds

by Eric Hayot

Although literature is not a technology, the historical models literary scholars use to describe it owe a great deal to the languages of originality, novelty, progress, and invention that characterize technological development. However this quintessentially modern mindset--putting progress at the center of historicity--makes it difficult for anyone eager to mount a case for why someone interested in the history of modern literary aesthetics ought to read the literature of the non-Western world.

In this groundbreaking book, Eric Hayot argues that contemporary debates about world literature and world literary systems can be rethought through an attention to the world-creating force of aesthetic objects. As he rethinks from the ground up our concepts of literary progress and historicity, Hayot re-describes the history of modern literature as we know it (or as we think we know it), developing new concepts and new formal languages to describe the aesthetic "physics" of the socially and imaginatively possible. Connecting this physics to historical shifts in world-view ranging from Copernicus to Marx, Don Quijote to Battlestar Galactica , On Literary Worlds shows how the very notion of the modern is, at heart, a cosmographical social form, and opens vast new directions for the future analysis of the activity and force of literature.

Genres: Nonfiction, Theory, Literary Criticism, World Literature

224 pages, Hardcover

First published October 9, 2012

About the author

Eric Hayot is professor of comparative literature and Asian studies at the Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of The Elements of Academic Style (Columbia, 2014), On Literary Worlds (2012), and The Hypothetical Mandarin (2009).

Reviews

[Jon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Progressivist literary history is unacknowledgedly Eurocentric and BORING; thank God that someone said so and suggested doable alternatives. Hayot is to literary historical assumptions what Rita Felski is to assumptions about the ethos of critique and Alasdair MacIntyre is to assumptions about how to pursue ethical questions. Refreshing.

[Sonia Perry · Rating 5 out of 5]

"A world encloses and worlds itself as the container that is identical with its contents and its containing, as a ground for itself that does not exceed or reach outside itself." (p. 24)

[Michael Meeuwis · Rating 3 out of 5]

Two stars? Five? So densely interesting was the first half of this book that the second--which makes a series of really quite obvious observations--feels mildly bathetic. The idea that there are unconsidered dominant texts or genres that might re-shape how we view the coming-together of literary and historical experience is rich--by which I mean, "I like it"--but then the lack of examples of what this might mean makes this observation seem suspiciously obvious and/or contentless. Further, the book's last 1/3, which addresses things like the institutional place of periodization, feel like an entirely different book--less dense, less contentious, less frankly interesting--than what comes before it. (Also, as a minor note: it's not as though periodization didn't exist in history, either, albeit not maybe in the forms that it now does--but as I understand it, the Modernism that is a one of the book's ostensible centers had a really strong interest in setting itself apart from what had come before it.)

As a review in the LA Review of Books notes, the book is provocative but feels unfinished. There's nothing wrong with that; but by the end of the book I lost some of that excitement for potential new work that I had at the beginning.

I think academics reading this--and I can't really imagine a non-academic audience reading this--will bring to the call for a new kind of literary worlding whatever they themselves are doing. For me, this book suggests what might be done by peering in archives to see how worlds ("'worlds'?") of literary history other than our dominant narratives might look. But I'm kind of doing that already. Ultimately, I'm less able at the end of this book--and thanks, Unnamed Colleague, for pointing this out--to articulate what new things it recommends than I was at the beginning.

Oh, but the beginning is so dense and interesting. I dunno. Back and forth. A copy of this book in which someone had torn out the last thirty or forty pages is probably a better book than what exists--but then the complete book would have all of the same ideas. Anyway, it will be interesting to see what happens to the ideas and new procedures that this book call for--what is done with them, or what is not. On its own terms, this is how the book suggests it be judged: given that it doesn't really present sustained readings itself, its value will be in terms of what other people do with it.

[Tom · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent book. Extensive review to come in the near future.