Introduction

Introduction* Núria Codina Solà Maps of World Literature Since its emergence in the 1990s as a field of research in its own right, world literature has typically been studied through maps. Cartography, Francesca Orsini points out, “seems more generally to be the first technology to which literary scholars reach out when they seek to spatialize literature” (349), especially in the case of those texts that span different countries and are characterized by global circulation. Mapping has been used as a metaphor to locate the power relations between major and minor literatures in the world literary system or as a visual tool to trace the unidirectional movements from the centres of production in Western Europe, which determine the literary norm, to the literary periphery, which is typically located on the linguistic margins of Europe or outside the Western world and is characterized by aesthetic derivation and institutional dependence. In his influential book What Is World Literature? (2003), David Damrosch describes world literature as “maps in motion,” a phrase that he borrows from Vinay Dharwadker to illustrate the “shifting relations both of literary history and cultural power” (24). While Damrosch proposes a dynamic approach to world literature, based on how a work circulates and is read beyond its point of origin at a given time, the use of the map as a metaphor is significant, since it presupposes an overarching portrayal of space that reflects Western “ideas about representation and reality emphasizing an ‘all seeing’ perspective, a fixed scale, and mathematical [End Page 5] projection from sphere to developable surface” (Pearce 17). Even though Damrosch is aware of the specific US-American perspective from which he writes (28), “[t]his account has so far implied that the early post-millennial career of world literature occurred largely in and around Anglophone, North-American academic contexts” (Helgesson and Vermeulen 7), with the result that the Anglophone has often been equated with the world (cf. Gunaratne). Dominant theories of world literature often overlook those literary texts whose trajectories and relationships take place on a non-Western, regional level or on the margins of the literary market. In his later essay “Where Is World Literature?” (2012), Damrosch offers a more critical discussion of the possibilities of cartographic representation: “To achieve a full understanding of where world literature is,” he argues, “we also need to see where it isn’t, and why” (219; emphasis in original), pointing to the blind spots on world literary maps and the importance of local levels of circulation that often remain unseen. When critiquing the broad patterns employed to describe the spatial scope of literary works, Damrosch challenges Franco Moretti’s method of distant reading, which turns to maps, graphs, and evolutionary trees to offer a systematic view of the world literary system—a form of mapping that, according to Damrosch, needs to be complemented with close readings of regional dynamics and individual works in order to “see both the forest and the trees, both the wave and the drops of water, both what is and what could be” (“Where” 220). Indeed, in his sociological approach to literary history inspired by Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-system theory, Moretti sees world literature as a “system that is simultaneously one, and unequal: with a core, and a periphery (and a semi-periphery) that are bound together in a relationship of growing inequality” (55–56; emphasis in original). This form of mapping assumes rigid and readymade boundaries between the different national literatures and parts of the world, which can be cast in fixed roles and positions. Using a necessarily limited and biased sample of data, a limitation that Moretti acknowledges when he writes that “[r]eading ‘more’ is always a good thing, but not the solution” (55), distant reading is reminiscent of traditional mapping procedures in which the ordering of spatial knowledge aims at making the world’s geographical complexity and mutability manageable: “Through statistical and graphic generalization, the features of the map are categorized into the hierarchies of quantitative and qualitative data; division of features into points, lines, and areas; and assignment of categories to symbolization through size, arrangement, and texture” (Pearce 18). Moretti’s focus on empirical maps, along...

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