To Conceive a World. A comparative study of two world literary theories

This thesis takes interest in a theoretical turn in world literature studies; from a focus on extratextual aspects, such as the global circulation of literary works, to intratextual aspects, such as literary works’ world-reflecting and world-creating abilites. I analyze two recent theories within this turn: the Warwick Research Collective’s Combined and Uneven Development and the postcolonial researcher Pheng Cheah’s What is a World?. My interest lies on differences and similarities that appear between the theories based on their different ways to conceive the world. The main questions examined concern what ”world” in ”world literature” means according to the respective theories, as well as how the different world concepts and understandings are expressed in each applied theory. The study includes a theoretical review that parallelly uncoils and analyzes WReC’s and Cheah’s different perspectives as well as their readings of two novels (The Sacred Book of the Werewolf by Viktor Pelevin and The Hungry Tide by Amitav Ghosh, both from 2004), and a comparative analysis that investigates aspects of the methods, frameworks and their practical applications. The study concludes that WReC's and Cheah's different world concepts lead to two very different views on the relationship between world and literature. For WReC, the world system is infrastructural to literature, while Cheah considers literature to be infrastructural to the world. But when comparing their applied theories, several affinities are found. It turns out that both encounter similar limitations that are partially attributed to the fact that they regard world literature as a strictly modern phenomenon: their theories cannot engage in deep-history and neither of them focus on issues of translation and multilingualism – two aspects that extratextual theories typically focus on. Finally, the thesis ends in an argument for a multidimensional approach, where different world concepts and theories are allowed to both concur and collide