NeMLA 2021 (Philadelphia): World Literature and Unhomeliness
World literature in its contemporary formation is often traced back to the catastrophe of World War II and the large number of European academics whose displacement was produced in its wake. Though the Euro-centric post-War vision of world literature has been gradually overcome with the introduction of East Asian, South Asian, and Middle Eastern (and, more rarely, Latin American and African) texts to syllabi and graduate programs, much of the pedagogy of world literature is still organized by national traditions and historical epochs defined by empires and states. Like the return of the repressed in Freud's famous formulation of the Unheimlich (lit.