The epistemological surplus-value of comparative world-literature in literary and post-colonial studies

Abstract

As a category of Comparative Literature, World Literature – an elliptical refraction of national literatures – is therefore be considered a mode of reading and of circulation, according to David Damrosch (2003, p. 281), a method which can be applied to the study of both classical and “new” works, especially those works from post-colonial spaces and times, that is, works by writers from former colonized spaces and former metropolis. The paper aims to study how this category – World Literature – allows to consider other paradigms, perspectives, aesthetic tastes and, above all, points of observation, to account for the diversity of literary traditions, without a hierarchical standard, as it usually happens in literary studies, especially by scholars and critics of African literatures.