Beyond literature

Abstract

If, for Goethe, the possibility of a world literature was assured by the universality of the idea of literature, Marx's thought points in the direction of a rather different view: it is the process of circulation that creates the conditions for comparison, as it assigns abstract value to singular objects. This process is never free of violence; in the case of literature, it requires the translation of diverse discursive practices into the abstract language of world literature. Throught a reading of Antonio Candido's essay "The Right to Literature", this paper argues that attempts to narrate the expasion of literature in mid-twentieth-century Latin American literary histories were often closer to the first of these two positions, with a universalist and inclusive idea of literature containing the difference of local discursive formations.