What Is a World?: On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature

by Pheng Cheah

In What Is a World? Pheng Cheah, a leading theorist of cosmopolitanism, offers the first critical consideration of world literature’s cosmopolitan vocation.  Addressing the failure of recent theories of world literature to inquire about the meaning of world , Cheah articulates a normative theory of literature’s world-making power by creatively synthesizing four philosophical accounts of the world as a temporal idealism, Marxist materialism, phenomenology, and deconstruction. Literature opens worlds, he provocatively suggests, because it is a force of receptivity. Cheah compellingly argues for postcolonial literature’s exemplarity as world literature through readings of narrative fiction by Michelle Cliff, Amitav Ghosh, Nuruddin Farah, Ninotchka Rosca, and Timothy Mo that show how these texts open up new possibilities for remaking the world by negotiating with the inhuman force that gives time and deploying alternative temporalities to resist capitalist globalization.

 

Genres: Literary Criticism, Research, Theory, Nonfiction, Cultural Studies

408 pages, Paperback

First published December 11, 2015

Reviews

[Katarzyna Bartoszynska · Rating 4 out of 5]

A dense, rigorous theoretical account of different ideas of worlding. It offers a really fantastic overview of the various theories of world underpinning world literary studies, and of the differences between them (the Intro offers a more succinct version, if you're looking for a brief text that would introduce grad students to some of these questions). The second portion applies the perspective developed in the first half to some specific texts. This was not as persuasive to me, perhaps because I haven't read the novels in question. But it was not clear how the theoretical framework helped you see the texts differently -- what it enabled that previous approaches occluded. It may be that one needs to be familiar with the texts, and previous work on them (the perennial problem of world literature studies...). In any case, I think this is a book I will return to.

[Michael Farrell · Rating 1 out of 5]

this might be worth more, maybe i should have skipped ahead to the derrida bits. but i read from start to finish, and i cdnt read very far because it seemed so defensive, sooky, and unpersuasive (lacking in citation eg) from early on. cheah is a professor, but sounded to me like the kind of rhetoric MA students are or should be marked down for.

[Justine Cheng · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some of the clearest Heidegger exegesis I've read. Consistently concise, clear and rigorous as far as I can tell (not a Heidegger scholar though). World/global cinema studies could benefit from this kind of theoretical clarity in order to better define its terms.

[World Literature Today]

This book was featured in the Nota Benes section of the Sept/Oct 2016 issue of World Literature Today Magazine.

http://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/2...

[غبار · Rating 3 out of 5]

one of the clearest, most systematic expositions i've read of derrida – his ideas of the gift, the secret, the event, & their relations to 'literature' & worlding.