Bücher der Reihe Latin American Literatures in the World / Literaturas Latinoamericanas en el Mundo

Die in den letzten zwanzig Jahren mit neuer Intensitat gefuhrte Debatte um den Begriff der Weltliteratur ist eng mit Fragen globaler Vernetzungen in einer polyzentrischen Welt verbunden. Zuletzt wurde Kritik insbesondere an globalisierungsaffinen Konzeptualisierungen laut: Inwiefern ist der Weltliteraturbegriff zu sehr mit politischen und okonomischen Globalisierungsdynamiken Hand in Hand gegangen? Solche Fragen sind nicht allein in der theoretischen Kontroverse zu klaren. Vielmehr muss die materielle Seite der Produktion von Weltliteratur starker als bisher einbezogen werden. Der Band zeigt anhand lateinamerikanischer Literaturen, wie Konstruktionsprozesse von Weltliteratur konkret ablaufen. Dazu werden Archivmaterialien ausgewertet: Notizen, Reiseberichte, Korrespondenzen zwischen Verleger/innen und Autor/innen. Gerade die lateinamerikanischen Beispiele geben Aufschluss sowohl uber Institutionalisierungsprozesse in der westlichen Welt als auch uber neue Perspektiven fur eine zeitgemae Kartierung von Weltliteratur jenseits etablierter Kanonisierungsdynamiken.

Landscape, as it appears and is described throughout the works of Bernardo Carvalho and Robert Walser, provides an excellent-yet virtually unexplored-pathway to the authors' literary projects. The landscape functions here as a synthetic and unifying figure that triggers, at first, through the analysis of its description per se, the main and most evident elements of the authors' works. However, when sustained as a methodological figure beyond the scope of its own description, the landscape soon reveals a darker, far more fascinating and far less explored side of the authors' oeuvres: a vengeful, seemingly defeatist resentment against the status quo, which gives way to the more latent and biting elements of the authors' prose, such as irony, the unheimlich, an anti-heroic agenda, the apocalyptic aesthetics of a disaster-prone fictional world, as well as an understanding of history and literature through the figures of failure and marginality. By drawing from diverse critical traditions from Latin-America and Europe, this comparative text seeks to unravel, in all of its complexity and scope, the fictional stage upon which Walser's and Carvalho's characters narrate, with their dying breath, a world that is slowly undoing itself.

From today's vantage point it can be denied that the confidence in the abilities of globalism, mobility, and cosmopolitanism to illuminate cultural signification processes of our time has been severely shaken. In the face of this crisis, a key concept of this globalizing optimism as World Literature has been for the past twenty years necessarily is in the need of a comprehensive revision. World Literature, Cosmopolitanism, Globality: Beyond, Against, Post, Otherwise offers a wide range of contributions approaching the blind spots of the globally oriented Humanities for phenomena that in one way or another have gone beyond the discourses, aesthetics, and political positions of liberal cosmopolitanism and neoliberal globalization. Departing basically (but not exclusively) from different examples of Latin American literatures and cultures in globalized contexts, this volume provides innovative insights into critical readings of World Literature and its related conceptualizations. A timely book that embraces highly innovative perspectives, it will be a mustread for all scholars involved in the field of the global dimensions of literature.