The Global Novel

Japanese writer like Mizumura.
But after Casanova h

Such “domination . . . is recognized as accepted by outsiders while remaining wholly unknown to the inhabitants of the centers”—just as an American reader, accustomed to living in an English-speaking world, would never guess at the anxieties that the English language causes a

That is, a country can accrue literary capital in excess of its geopolitical power—like France in the twentieth century—and, conversely, a writer from the periphery (Joyce in Ireland, Kafka in Czechoslovakia) can elude his or her political identity to become an international figure.

The idea of national literature itself, Mizumura speculates, may turn out to be only a brief parenthesis in the long history of literature. In most times and places, she argues, literacy required bilingualism: The language a writer spoke was not the language he used for writing books. This was equally true in medieval Europe, where Latin was the language of international philosophy and science, as in medieval Japan, where poetry and religious works were always composed in Chinese. The idea that a writer had a special, even spiritual relationship with his vernacular language was an invention of post-Renaissance Europe

The Fall of Language in the Age of English, by the Japanese novelist Minae Mizumura.

World literature is likened to the Davos Forum, a venue where celebrities and tycoons discuss “the terrific problems of a humanity whose predicament they appear to have escaped.” Indeed, world literature has its own institutions—the Frankfurt Book Fair, multinational conglomerate publishers, international literary festivals, the Nobel Prize—which the editors consider to be inherently corrupt.

This is one of the commonest charges against world literature: By making foreignness into a literary commodity, it prevents the possibility of any true encounter with difference. I