Abstract
After having briefly drawn the genealogy of the concept of World literature, I illustrate what this notion point to nowadays, by proposing an account of the current debate focused on four crucial problems: the definition, the scale, the relation between the local and the global dimension of cultural phenomena and the place occupied by postcolonial literature within the global market. Finally, I analyse two emblematic examples of World literature: Maps written by Nuruddin Farah and The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro.
I demonstrate that these two authors not only stage the conditions of possibility of their discourse, but they also thematize the method of reading required at present by world literature, namely the capacity to interconnect close and distant reading.