Convenors:
Dr Debjani Ganguly, HRC, ANU. E: debjani.ganguly@anu.edu.au
Dr Shameem Black, School of Cultural Inquiry, ANU. E: shameem.black@anu.edu.au

At a time when disciplines are scrambling to keep up with the accelerations and upheavals of a global informational economy, it is also time to reflect on new and emergent conceptual paradigms. The idea of world literature is not quite new in this sense, for both Marx and Goethe debated its potential in the nineteenth century context of increasing trade and commerce. What is new is its reconceptualisation under conditions of contemporary globalization.

This symposium aims to address the many dimensions of literary world making for our times and to explore their impact on the history of literary studies. How do we define the ‘world’ in world literature? What about the multiple ways of worlding evoked by terms such as transnational, transregional and global? How do these geospatial categories cathect with literary histories spanning centuries of literary production?