Misplacing World Literature

This chapter examines the difference Roberto Schwarz’s approach makes in the current debate on world literature. His attention to the formal arrangements of literary works demonstrates how the interrogation of the categories we use to think about world literature, such as the local and the universal, the foreign and the national, can shed light on the socio-historical formation which transverses those categories. As such, his way of reading literary works functions as a powerful instrument for revealing the social lineaments of the current situation.