The Task of World Literature and the Problem of Universality

세계문학의 과제와 보편의 문제

The term of world literature is now becoming an issue and lens through which we need to rethink the value of literature on a more universal dimension so as to imagine newly the location of the local or regional literature that has been alienated from the field of world literature. This kind of recognition leads us to consider the term world literature in relation to globalization and universality and to locate it on a problematical territory rather than to understand it in the traditional and Western way. Therefore the concept of world literature is now given to us as a task to resolve from our particular, or more precisely, peripheral context. The peripheral context could best operate as a possibility of reforming the West-centered order of world literature particularly in the way in which world literature obtains a more universal value. When we discuss world literature we need to consider the way of practice to re-highlight the possibility of periphery and pre-modernity without neglecting the 'light' of modernity and center. In this respect, the discourse of 'East Asia' may be useful for a transnational approach to world literature which focuses on the criticism of all kinds of centrism by foregrounding the concepts of othering and de-homogenization. For this I emphasize the attitude and methodology of 'post' which includes the power of othering and de-homogenization. The 'posty' theories such as post-colonialism, post-structuralism, post-nationalism and post-humanism allow us to indicate properly and acutely our aim by means of freer play of thought and at the same time more just definition and practice of our thought; that is, only by embracing both indication and play can we maintain the universal value of world literature. Here we can say that the global and local enterprise of ethics is the fundamental basis of world literature.