Is The Novel Becoming Uniform Around the World?

Or: Can our attention to the local overcome that impending conformity?

This is an unusual essay on the “global novel,” because it’s part of a chapter in a book about art writing. My question in the book is whether the writing of art history becoming more uniform around the world. (I think it is. In many parts of the world art historians are trying to emulate certain expectations about form, citation, argument, research that are practiced in a number of locations around what I call the “North Atlantic.” The result is an accelating uniformity in writing about art, which is oddly counterbalanced by an equally rapid growth in attention to local practices of art.)

In one chapter I compare the increasing homogeneity of art historical writing to the situation in art criticism, which retains more variety, and to art theory, which is very uniform because French poststructural criticism is used to interpret art of nearly all cultures and periods. (People who use art theory tend to draw on the same couple of generations of French philosophers, from Foucault and Lacan to Derrida, Deleuze, Malabou, Laruelle, and others, and virtually no art writers draw on non-Western sources for their theory.) I also compare art history, art criticism, and art theory to studio art instruction, which is also globalized, with many art schools and academies teaching in similar ways.

At the end of that chapter I have a section on the global novel, to see whether it might help illuminate these questions of art writing. Here’s that section, basically as it appears in the book.

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Art criticism, art theory, and art instruction share a lack of critical reflection on their global diversity or uniformity. The study of the contemporary novel is an instructive contrast and parallel, because it has been the subject of an extensive literature.

The novel is often considered as an optimal example of a worldwide practice that nevertheless remains attentive to the texture of local life. In that respect, it presents a close parallel to the self-descriptions of global art history, whose authors often rely on the attenton they pay to the local to exempt themselves from charges of uniformity in argument.

Mario Ortiz-Robles puts this well: “the novel’s loose, though fairly stable, formal traits,” he writes, “make it particularly well-suited to the task of representing… widely varying local contexts without significant loss of structural integrity.” (“Local Speech, Global Acts: Performative Violence and the Novelization of the World,” Comparative Literature 59 no. 1, 2007, p. 1.) If we read “narrative and interpretive methods” for “formal traits,” we have a good approximation of descriptions of the successes of global art history: it is taken to have a recognizable form, a “structural integrity,” that can work in very different cultural contexts.

The study of the history of the novel and the study of the history of art share a phase, extending roughly from the mid 19th through the mid 20th century, during which scholars were interested in what Bruce Mazlish calls “world art history.” In his usage the expression “world art history” denotes the study of common themes and ideas in art of different periods and cultures. In art history that ambition marks a number of late 19th century “universal histories,” and includes 20th century scholars such as Riegl. As in the study of the history of the novel, such “world art histories” tended to disappear with the dissemination of poststructuralism. A late summary of the state of such work in literary history is in the classic text of New Criticism, René Wellek and Austin Warren’s Theory of Literature (1942, third edition 1956). The authors trace the idea of world literature to Goethe’s Weltliteratur, which was not the study of literature “on all five continents,” but “the ideal of the unification of all literatures into one great synthesis.” They are in favor of reviving a study like Goethe’s; today’s scholars, Wellek and Warren say, have been influenced by nationalism to “increasingly narrow provincial cultivation of the study of national literatures.” It is not that Wellek and Warren are against the idea of considering what makes a national literature: they are afraid of reducing literature to what would today be called ideology. Theory of Literature is a reminder of a time in which it was still possible to say—using the grammatical form aptly called the “present unreal conditional”—“we would argue that we cannot even seriously wish that the diversities of national literatures should be obliterated” (p. 49). Needless to say the authors do not mention any “literatures” outside of Europe. The histories they admire are Ernst Curtius’s European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (1948) and Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis (1946), which are as enormous, as erudite, and as Eurocentric as their own book. Theory of Literature represents an interesting moment, just before and during World War II, in which German and Italian sources were as much a part of the conversation as French ones, and in which ambitious surveys of world literature, or world art history, could be imagined without too much awareness of art made outside Europe. I mention this as background: the parallels I have in mind have to do with the contemporary situation.

There are several possible topics in the theory and history of the novel that bear on its globalization, including the field of translation studies, and the emergence of the discipline of comparative literature as a mediator for global studies of writing. For Jacques Lezra, for example, comparative literature can play a central role in articulating national literary cultures because of its “‘consciousness of languages’” and their effects on the “production of differences.” (Lezra, “The Futures of Comparative Literature,” 2012, p. 88.) From many possibilities I choose five topics.

(A) The idea that the global novel is made expressly for translation

The novelist, critic, and translator Tim Parks has taken strong positions on world literature. Replying to an essay by David Shields, which was later incorporated into Shields’s book How Literature Saved My Life (2013), Parks notes that the local and the contextual is lost when writers insist, as Shields does, on a continuum of global practices, where “every man contains within himself the entire human condition.” Parks advocates local, regional, and national traditions over packaged novels “that will lead to prominence on the world stage.” The problem, he thinks, is “a slow weakening of our sense of being inside a society with related and competing visions of the world to which we make our own urgent narrative contributions.” That kind of writing, aware of its context and tradition, is “being replaced by the author who takes courses to learn how to create a product with universal appeal, something that can float in the world mix, rather than feed into the immediate experience of people in his own culture.” (New York Review of Books blog, January 19, 2012; see also Where I’m Reading From, 31-9, 60-71, 85-92, 183-201.)

In an earlier blog, titled “The Dull New Global Novel,” Parks presents a contentious version of this concern. He notes how authors increasingly want to be published in English, and have their books sold internationally. Agents and publicists orchestrate “simultaneous launches” of books, using corporate-style promotional strategies. As a result, “a reader picking up a copy of… a work by Umberto Eco, or Haruki Murakami, or Ian McEwan, does so in the knowledge that this same work is being read now, all over the world.” Parks’s target is the uniformity of the literature that is produced:

What are the consequences for literature? From the moment an author perceives his ultimate audience as international rather than national, the nature of his writing is bound to change. In particular one notes a tendency to remove obstacles to international comprehension. Writing in the 1960’s, intensely engaged with his own culture and its complex politics, Hugo Claus apparently did not care that his novels would require a special effort on the reader’s and above all the translator’s part if they were to be understood outside his native Belgium. In sharp contrast, contemporary authors like the Norwegian Per Petterson, the Dutch Gerbrand Bakker, or the Italian Alessandro Baricco, offer us works that require no such knowledge or effort, nor offer the rewards that such effort will bring.

More importantly the language is kept simple. Kazuo Ishiguro has spoken of the importance of avoiding wordplay and allusion to make things easy for the translator. Scandinavian writers I know tell me they avoid character names that would be difficult for an English reader. [New York Review of Books blog, February 9, 2010]

The risk is that the market for world literature will “neglect… the kind of work that revels in the subtle nuances of its own language and literary culture, the sort of writing that can savage or celebrate the way this or that linguistic group really lives. In the global literary market there will be no place for any Barbara Pyms and Natalia Ginzburgs. Shakespeare would have eased off the puns. A new Jane Austen can forget the Nobel.”

It is easy to be sympathetic to Parks’s appeal, at the end of that essay, to “avoid writing over and over the dull, amazing novel, or the amazingly dull novel that new market conditions are inviting us to write, ‘the Esperanto of international literary fiction’ as Adam Shatz has called it, reviewing Orhan Pamuk.”

Parks has elaborated his critique by including translators in the mix: what appears as a universal novel, worthy of the Nobel Prize, may actually be “put together” or “consigned to the page” by a translator, who is implicated in the projection of internationalism and the appeal to an “international public.” He argues that the process of internationalization of the novel does not liberate, but reinforces stereotypes:

However much you prize your individuality, your autonomy from your national culture, nevertheless you’d better have an interesting national product to sell on the international market: Scandinavian melancholy, Irish burlesque, the South American folk tradition. Or best of all, some downright political oppression of one variety or another. [Parks, “The Nobel Individual,” Times Literary Supplement, April 20, 2011]

(Parks’s essay got a number of responses. Andrew Seal raised cogent objections to Parks’s choice of examples and his claim that the phenomenon is relatively new. Yet for my purposes here it is the outline of his argument, rather than his examples, that matters. For Seal’s essay see tinyurl.com/k2b6wto. David Damrosch, whom I will discuss below, also notes that “a defining feature of world literature… is that it consists of works that thrive in translation,” but he points out that translatability and universality are not necessarily related. “There can be no more global work than Finnegans Wake,” he writes, but it is “only a curiosity in translation,” while the more local Dubliners works well in translation. Sharae Deckard has connected Parks’s critique to a Jamesonian analysis of world literature in “Mapping the World-Ecology: Conjectures on World-Ecological Literature,” 2014; in Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature, 2017, Rebecca Walkowitz suggests there are virtues in the kind of reading that a novel “born translated” implies.)

The politics of identity and ethnicity in visual art is usually critical of “national culture,” but artwork in international contexts is expected to represent its places of origin. Parks’s suggestion that novelists write in a way that is easily translated is a useful way of naming the uniformity in the forms of reference that visual artists employ when they want to be visible in international venues. Complicated, apparently difficult, idiosyncratic, overly demanding references to the local are generally avoided in favor of signs of identity that can be easily assimilated. Perhaps that is the art world’s version of translatability.

In art historical writing there is no such length limitation, but there is a similar tendency toward ease of “translation.” Local contexts and practices are presented in ways that make them comprehensible and engaging for “generalist” readers, or readers outside the author’s specialty. The result can be writing that is curiously easy to digest, even though its subject matter may be very distant from most readers’ experiences. Most major art history journals publish such articles regularly: they “represent” global practices without asking readers to make the effort that would be required to read texts written for other specialists. There may be a parallel here between the carefully curated local detail in such essays and the grit and difficulty of language and words that Tim Parks misses in the “new global novel.”

(B) Denials and remnants of nationalism and regionalism

Parks gives several examples of writing that resists the leveling he associates with the desire for international success, including The Great Gatsby, Barbara Pym, Hugo Claus, and Henry Green. (These examples are scattered through Where I’m Reading From.) Such writing embraces “culture-specific clutter and linguistic virtuosity,” but it also tends to speak to “the immediate experience of people” in their “own cultures.” The first criterion is linguistic and the second has to do with subject matter. The first asks authors to avoid simplifying their language, the other asks them to avoid the homogenization of reported experience. This is a doubled argument that also appears in discussions of global art. The issue in both fields, I think, is the concordance or adjudication between these ideals.

In a review of Yvonne Owuor’s novel Dust, the novelist Taiye Selasi praises the author’s lack of “African archetypes” and her independence of “the conventions of interracial romance,” and says the novel is not just for “Afrophiles” (New York Times Book Review, March 2, 2014). She also praises Owuor’s writing in unusual and specific terms:

Owuor’s prose is a physical expression of the landscape it evokes: raw, fragmented, dense, opaque. Beautiful, but brutally so. There’s a sort of lawless power at work in her text, a refreshing break from the clinical reserve so beloved by American M.F.A. programs. The language sweats. It bleeds. Critics may object to the novel’s unapologetic density, or find the characters’ ruminations unfashionably ‘emotional.’

This description will be familiar to readers of eastern and western African novels, and Selasi makes her regional preference clear by the comparison with North American writing programs. It’s difficult not to imagine that the critics she is thinking of are mainly in North America and Europe. In this way Selasi conjures a quality of Dust that may appeal mainly to “Afrophiles” or is at least not the general “bibliophiles” who prefer work that appeals outside its places of origin.

(Given these distinctions it is not irrelevant that the two authors here are black women and the three critics are white men, although the internationalism of the group is not immediately apparent from those identifications—Owuor is Kenyan; Selasi is Nigerian and Ghanaian, born in England and raised in the US; Parks is English, but lives in Italy; Damrosch is American; and Siskind is Argentine.)

What is helpful here, for the parallel to visual art, is the difference between Selasi’s fully articulated position about how novels might avoid regionalism (for example, by omitting “the conventions of interracial romance”) and her implicit regionalism when it comes to style and voice. The contrast between conceptualized or simplified positions, on the one hand, and embodied, complex positions, on the other, also marks writing on visual art and art history worldwide: some of what makes the art regional or local is identified and analyzed in the texts, and some is generalized or unrepresented. In my reading of Parks’s essays, there is a similar tension between an idea of local or regional tradition, which can’t be defined and relies on examples like Jane Austen; and the idea of nuances, clutter, and local usages, which can be defined but not easily translated.

(C) Quantitative and systematic studies of world literature

There are initiatives in art history to study world art using macroeconomic and financial indicators, to study dissemination and circulation of art using empirical data, and to study art as an effect of Darwinian or neurobiological principles. Those projects are small in comparison to the application of quantitative and systematic analysis to the study of world literature.

Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History (2005), for example, leans in part on Immanuel Wallerstein’s The Modern World System (1974; part 3, 1989), which proposes a combined post-disciplinary social science endeavor, aimed at understanding the redistribution of value from the “core” to the “periphery”; it would include national or local identities but its real interest would be the “world system” of modernity, which is global. Franco Moretti’s project combines Wallerstein’s ideas with Darwinian evolutionary theory and visual communications. As Damrosch summarizes it:

In Moretti’s view, the European novel can be mapped as an invasive species, spreading around the world in the wake of colonial and neocolonial political and economic developments, putting down roots in cultures that previously had little history of extended prose fiction, and variously suppressing traditional genres and inspiring new creativity, usually after an initial period of uncertain, derivative composition. [p. 506]

Moretti’s method isn’t quantitative as much as a matter of “deliberate reduction and abstraction” (Moretti, p. 1). One difficulty with such an approach is that it may not make contact with existing ways of understanding the novels he studies. The culminating example in Graphs, Maps, Trees is “free indirect discourse,” a complex term that is central to definitions of literary modernism. (It means, nominally, the practice of reporting and commenting on a character’s speech and thoughts instead of just quoting them.) Moretti traces a history of free indirect discourse using a tree graph inspired by Darwin and Ernst Mayr, but for the subject itself he cites only Ann Banfield’s “classic study” (1982) and older sources such as Bakhtin. His tree graph is divided into “second person / orality / collective” and “first person / thought / individual”—six contentious terms, grouped into two problematic sets. Moretti’s purpose is to reveal “some fundamental principles of cultural history” by “replacing the old, useless distinctions (high and low; canon and archive; this or that national literature…) with new temporal, spatial, and morphological distinctions” (p. 91).

A possible point of contact with histories of visual arts is Moretti’s interest in avoiding types and genres. As he says, once you replace a “type” such as detective fiction with a tree, “the genre becomes an abstract ‘diversity spectrum.’ (p. 76). The problem in adapting such an approach to the global study of art history is that it omits aesthetic criteria. Significant or “interesting” novels, practices, and types—which crop up throughout Moretti’s work—are discussed in terms of their survival (in a Darwinian or evolutionary sense), their success at defining niche markets, or their place in branching evolutionary trees. The result is counterintuitive for many readers. Ultimately, why study the romantic novel, the detective story, or the history of free indirect discourse, if the point isn’t the individual novel or story? Moretti’s answer has long been that the evolution and differentiation of the romantic novel is inherently more representative of novels than, say, another close reading of Wuthering Heights. The exclusion of close readings (or, in art historical terms, close descriptions, formal analysis, attention to facture, materiality, and other ways of paying attention to the particularities of the artwork) is ultimately an exclusion of the aesthetic moment. On the other hand, systematic studies in art history, including studies of macroeconomic, financial, and “neuroaesthetic” approaches, have contributed many needed corrections to received ideas about genres and practices.

Moretti’s is only one of several projects to apply social science methods to literary history. Pascale Casanova’s La République mondiale des lettres (1999) also presents a Darwinian model, and is closer at least in that respect to existing studies in global art history such as Julian Stallabrass’s Art Incorporated: The Story of Contemporary Art (2005), although Casanova’s work has mainly had resonance in literary criticism. (For example Christopher Prendergast, Debating World Literature.) There are many possibilities for links between systematic, sociological, economic, evolutionary approaches to world literature and to world art.

Within literary criticism, Moretti remains controversial for another reason, which can also be helpful to the study of world art: his mantra of “distant reading”—machine-assisted reading that takes in hundreds or even thousands of novels to find formal similarities—has been resisted by scholars who feel it vitiates “close reading,” the sine qua non of aesthetic appreciation since the New Criticism of the mid-20th c. A forum in the professional journal PMLA in 2017 brought this out very clearly (PMLA 132 no. 3, 2017, 613-89). As Bethany Wiggin wrote, Moretti offered a “pact with the devil”: give up the pleasures of close aesthetic reading for the undiscovered territories of the world novel (682). A “distant reading” brackets out the aesthetic enjoyment of the text in the same way as a sociological, anthropological, or statistical study of world art might do. The benefit is that it becomes possible to see large-scale patterns of development.

(D) The remnants of the canon

David Damrosch’s essay “Frames for World Literature” shows how the early history of writing on world literature focused on Western examples (Damrosch, in Grenzen der Literatur Zu Begriff und Phänomen des Literarischen, 2009). He says the change from histories that exhibit what he calls “great-power emphasis” to histories with more genuine globalism happened after 2000; his own Longman Anthology of World Literature appeared in 2004.

It is interesting to speculate how such a history of histories of world literature might correspond to histories of visual art. In art history I imagine one thing that scholars might want to say is that the idea of a world art history is itself European. This is so, I think, even though histories of world art produced outside western Europe are often illegible or even unrecognizable as plausible histories. I have documented a number in the book Stories of Art.

That aside, art history texts can be said to have been effectively global at an earlier stage: the first edition of the Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces (1956) had only Western authors (all but one male), while Helen Gardner’s Art Through the Ages, now the best-selling one-volume textbook of art, had non-Western material, of an abbreviated and formalist sort, in its first edition in 1926. Art history has also in large measure avoided the “canon wars” that spread through the other humanities in the 1980s simply by increasing the size of its surveys and textbooks. It takes less time in the classroom to include a painting than a novel, so art historians were able to add to the roster of artists, practices, and cultures, without making hard decisions about whom to exclude. (This is discussed in Stories of Art.)

Damrosch distinguishes between three “basic paradigms” of world literature: novels “as classics, as masterpieces, and as windows on the world.” He sees the last of those as ascendant since the mid-1990s (p. 503). He points out that in the growing interest in world literature, the “classics” and “masterpieces” have not been ignored in favor of “windows on the world”: no one fails to read Virgil or Shakespeare because they are also reading Toni Morrison. The old system, Damrosch says, was comprised of the canon and a satellite system of “minor authors.” (His examples are Petronius and Suetonius, who served to highlight Virgil and Ovid; and William Hazlitt and Robert Southey, who were “minor authors” in comparison to Wordsworth and Byron.) Damrosch proposes that the current system has three “levels”:

a hyper-canon, a counter-canon, and a shadow canon. The hyper-canon is populated by the older “major” authors who have held their own or even gained ground over the past twenty years. The counter-canon is composed of the subaltern and contestatory voices of writers in less-commonly-taught languages and in minor literatures within great-power languages. [p. 511]

In this system, the real losers are the “minor authors… who fade increasingly into the background, becoming a sort of shadow canon that the older scholarly generation still knows (or, increasingly, remembers fondly from long-ago reading), but whom the younger generations of students and scholars encounter less and less.” The hyper-canon continues to be discussed—there are more books on Kafka and Joyce each year—and smaller countries can find themselves reduced to one author as their hyper-canonical representative. The shadow canon is “figures everyone ‘knows’ (most often just through one or two brief anthology pieces) but who are rarely discussed in print: they served their purposes in postcolonial literary criticism, and are now in danger of being forgotten.” Damrosch names Fadwa Tuqan, Ghalib, and Premchand, and he notes how the hyper-canon pushes authors into the shadow canon: “Alan Paton gives way to Nadine Gordimer, R. K. Narayan is upstaged by Salman Rushdie.”

This candid if somewhat Darwinian discussion of the economy of authors in world literature might be of interest to global art history studies. Few books have addressed the concept of the canon in art history (an exception is Anna Brzyski’s Partisan Canons, 2007), but it may be time to revisit that apparently vitiated theme. There is certainly a shadow canon in art history, even if the selection and inclusion processes are quite different.

(E) The globalization of the novel

Mariano Siskind makes a distinction between the globalization of the novel and the novelization of the global. The latter is “the production of images of the globalized world,” and it produced “dissimilar imaginaries” of the global depending on the authors’ geopolitical situations. (“The Globalization of the Novel and the Novelization of the Global: A Critique of World Literature,” 2010, in World Literature: A Reader, p. 331; and in Cosmopolitan Desires: Global Modernity and World Literature in Latin America.)

This might be useful for studies of world art: the parallel would be the globalization of the artwork and the visualization of the global—both familiar phenomena. In Siskind’s account, a “cultural mediation” accounts for the “gap” between the globalization of the novel and the novelization of the global, between “capitalism’s creation of ‘a world after its own image’… through the global expansion of its aesthetic and cultural institutions,” and “local literary reappropriations and reinscriptions” of that process. I wonder, in the art world, how much the globalization of art and visualizations of the global could be seen to differ, except in their iconography (except, that is, for the particular subjects they portray).

Siskind asks questions directly related to the themes I have been exploring. Is there a difference, he wonders, “between the European novel and the Latin American novel, the Asian novel, the African novel, and so on?” Yes, because it is possible to point to “formal and thematic aspects of individual works” that express the novelization of the global. But no, because it is hard to find “institutional and political” differences in the function of the novel in different places. “In other words,” he concludes, “the world system of novelistic production, consumption, and translation reinforces the dream of a global totality of bourgeois freedom with Hegelian overtones.” (p. 331)

He says he was initially heartened by Damrosch’s project of world literature in his Longman Anthology of World Literature (second edition, 2008) until he saw the sort of “syllabi, anthologies, and research agendas” that would actually result: they would be the same “romantic ideology,” and the same idea of the “indivisible unity of the nation.” So what would a better kind of pedagogy of world literature look like? Siskind agrees with Moretti that the study of world literature must become the study of world literatures, ideally excluding nothing and therefore incapable of examples that are “isolated because of their supposed capacity to represent… national or regional cultures.” (p. 344) This is “convincing,” but “impractical,” Siskind writes, and he ends by proposing his distinction between the globalization of the novel and the novelization of the global as a way of understanding how the universality of world literature is being made, while also “resisting the temptation to fall back” on “national and regional cultural identities.” (p. 346)

Another critique of the globalization of the novel appeared in 2013 in the online journal n+1, under the title “World Lite: What is Global Literature?” It argues, informally and in an unsystematic manner, against various kinds of novels currently viable internationally, such as the postwar European novel, exemplified by Houellebecq and including “Perec, Bernhard, Nádas, Nooteboom, Jelinek, Marías, and now Knausgård,” a literature “written by, about, and for literary people who attain a critical mass only at the Frankfurt Book Fair.” Such authors’ “melancholy wanderings among the dead seem a way of shielding the novel’s protagonist, and perhaps the novelist himself, from a contemporary world he can’t face… present day confusions and controversies are neglected or sentimentalized.”

The anonymous editors’ principal target is novelists who have lost their political edge after receiving university appointments. They make this argument about Salman Rushdie, Junot Díaz, Dinaw Mengestu, Michael Ondaatje, and others, indicting a kind of “global formula” that produces books appetizing to the small publics that still consume literature. Díaz, for example, gave up chronicling “down-and-out Dominicans” and wrote a novel about an American academic who is obsessed “with the semiological analysis of comic books and science fiction.” They propose the only good academic novel is DeLillo’s White Noise, which was written by a writer who never taught in a university. Political retrenchment is common: even Naipaul, they say, eventually retired to England after writing The Enigma of Arrival.

“World Lite” provoked responses by authors eager to point to literatures the editors had overlooked, to show the essay’s Anglophone bias, to argue that not all university novels are bad, or to point out that some professors write about themes other than university life. (See MLYNXQUALEY, “World Literature Certainly Sounds Like a Nice Idea”; and Jennifer Solheim, “n+1’s World Lite: A Hopeful Response.”) The editors then responded, defending their position against claims of Anglophone regionalism, but they did not address deeper issues. (“‘The Rest is Indeed Horseshit,’ Pt. 6, On World Lit #BEEF,” on the n+1 website.) The essay wasn’t meant to stand up to concerted criticism: the editors even posted some of their emails to one another, showing how rapidly they had formulated some of their judgments, such as their opinion that Goethe wasn’t a good novelist. (“Editorial Debates On the ‘World Literature’ Intellectual Situation, Issue 17,” also on the n+1 website.)

For the parallel I am pursuing here, it matters that “World Lite” is consistently political in its interests and values. For the editors, political opposition is the sine qua non of viable world literature. They praise work that remains outside the circuit of academic, elite, “international middlebrow” taste. The terms of their approbation closely match the values of postcolonial theory in the visual arts; they support work that finds places and projects of resistance, “opposition,” and “most embarrassingly, truth.” They give several examples: Eduard Limonov, Roberto Bolaño—and especially the astonishing 150-page novel-within-a-novel in 2666 about women murdered in a town that is modeled on Juarez—Marie N'Diaye, Elena Ferrante—especially Days of Abandonment—Juan Villoro, Álvaro Enrigue, Yan Lianke, and Pola Oloixarac. These are roughly the equivalents of politically active visual art from Haacke to Ra’ad and the Yes Men, and to the art historians and visual studies writers who privilege such work, from the group around The Anti-Aesthetic to contemporary writers like Nicholas Mirzoeff.

This political reading of world literature faces the same difficulties as the socio-economic readings of art history and theory influenced by postcolonial theory: that is, it begs the question of why literature is what’s at issue. Form, style, voice, quality, rhetoric, and writing in general may only be mentioned only in passing. Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses, for example, is praised for using “metafictional techniques of postmodernism to address the theme of migration,” but that doesn’t clarify why it was politically efficacious to mix postmodern writing with themes of hybridity. Is it just that the divided and multiple forms and voices of postmodern metafiction resemble the forms of contemporary diasporas, hybridities, and migrations? If so, that would be an observation, not a justification, and it would still leave unsaid why the optimal vehicle is fiction and not postmodern theory.

At the end of their response, the n+1 editors mention Michael Ondaatje as an example of a bad writer: it’s the only discussion of style in the response, and it’s just an assertion of Ondaatje’s bad writing, reminiscent of the way that connoisseurs used to assert quality without argument. Such brief, unsupported mentions of writing quality make it difficult to see why the globalization of the novel, in particular, should be any greater concern than the globalization of any cultural product that carries political meaning.

These are glimpses of the larger literature on the globalization of the novel. In different ways each raises the question of how best to write about a practice—the “global novel”—that is becoming increasingly uniform even while it continues to claim to be an authentic vehicle of the local and particular.

When Lezra ponders the sense of teaching Comparative Literature at NYU–Abu Dhabi, he is interested in what it would mean to teach what Matthew Arnold called “the best which has been thought and said in the world”—provided, Lezra says, such a thing even exists anymore, and if it exists, if it is accessible, and if it is accessible, if it is teachable, and if it is teachable, if “its teaching is desirable.” In this exceptionally thoughtful account the voice, critical terms, and issues remain faithfully American. There is no mention, for example, of the possibility that engaging Arabic-language literary-critical traditions might be pertinent or compatible. The Abu Dhabi campus has students from roughly 100 countries, and only 15% or so are Emirati students, so it poses an especially complex case for questions like Lezra’s. (Lezra, “The Futures of Comparative Literature,” 2012, p. 83.)