The renewed interest in the concept of world literature in the past ten years presents one example of an attempt to go beyond the conflict between the local and the global in order to understand the conditions of literature in a transnational space of globalized cultures and media. In this perspective no literature is naturally world literature, but any work of literature may become world literature through the interpretive strategies and contexts we apply. Ultimately, these new approaches consider the challenge of cosmopolitanism as a global, but always diverse and rooted, culture.
Working with world literature is a process that does not exclude certain present or historical forms of literature; nor does it exclude certain local or historical literatures. On the contrary, through inclusion rather than exclusion it allows us to be aware of unseen correlations between historical periods, between texts and genres, and between local and border-crossing phenomena. Similar attempts to consider new interpretive strategies can be found in the arts and within cultural studies.
The interpretive strategies valuable to studies in world literature focus on the fact that literature, first and foremost, works by transgressing the cultural borders imposed by place, time and media. In a world literature perspective we focus on those aspects of literary works, which makes evident this paradox of transgression: that literature is always locally anchored and border-crossing at the same time. Literature foregrounds this tension on multiple levels and in various historical and aesthetic dimensions.
The seminar invites papers that all must deal with concrete literary works or other art works or particular authors covering areas such as the following in a historical, methodological and analytical perspective: