From Third-World Literature to World Literature

What is it about?

This article links the distant-reading debate, which after its first decade is now producing first book-length defenses and critiques of Franco Moretti’s distant reading, to another debate, a decade older still, the one on third-world culture. In and around this debate, Aijaz Ahmad launched a critique of close reading that can today be valorized by Moretti’s similar critique, as well as a rejection of Fredric Jameson’s Third-Worldism that today shares with the critiques of distant reading some of their empiricism. What Jameson’s and Ahmad’s interventions into literary theory meant at the end of the real-socialist alternative, and what Moretti’s similar intervention meant at the end of the US alternative to real-socialism, a synoptic reading of all three interventions might help achieve at the end of what seemed like the European alternative to the US alternative.

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Why is it important?

Historicizes the post-Y2K distant-reading debate between Franco Moretti and his critics in the context of the pre-1989 third-world literature debate between Fredric Jameson and Aijaz Ahmad.