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WORLD LITERATURE, in the form gestured at by Goethe and now canonized by the academy, has become an empty vessel for the occasional self-ratification of the global elite, who otherwise mostly ignore it. If an earlier World Literature arose in the four decades after World War II to challenge norther…

[...] Rushdie emerged from the fatwa a damaged writer, his puns reflexes, his recourse to myth and fable showing signs of hackery. He took to appearing onstage with U2, grinning with Bono under the suspended Trabants of their Zooropa tour. To view him now — witty but humorless, soft and thick with …

Across the hall, the purely academic panels in the 1980s were, for better or worse, more vituperative.

Insurrectionary Gordimer has given way to the the sedulously horrified Coetzee

the Iranian revolution - itself a salvo against cultural globalization