In much of the contemporary critical debate on “world literature,” the onus in the compound has fallen on “world” rather than on “literature.” This is to be expected. After all, “literature” is a more or less transparent concept, whereas what is at stake in the discussion is the remit, scale, scope, objectives, and disciplinary dimensions of a literary studies expanded from the nation unto the “world.” This tendency is evident in the writings of David Damrosch, Franco Moretti, and Pascale Casanova, the “Holy Trinity”—to borrow Robert Young's ironic but affectionate quip about the founding figures of postcolonial studies—of world literature.

For instance, Damrosch opens What is World Literature? (2003)—the grouping's pivotal text—by abjuring any close and explicit attention to the concept of literature itself: “[i]n this book,” he explains, “I will have relatively little interest in attempting any firm definition of literature as such.” Damrosch suspends this question in order to facilitate his definition of world literature as “a subset of the plenum of literature,” and to thereby develop a groundwork for his now vastly influential theory of and methodology for a world literature that “encompass[es] all literary works that circulate beyond their culture of origin, either in translation or in their original language.” Intended at least in part to assuage anxieties about what would otherwise be the “sheer scope” of world literature among scholars, this theory and methodology proceeds by way of a series of spatial metaphors—most notably, that of “elliptical” or “double refraction”— that purport to describe the nature of the production, translation, circulation, and reception of works of literature in the world. In other words, it proceeds by way of a novel and sophisticated worldly cartography of an object that is by and large given or assumed.