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In the last sixty years, the video game industry has grown from quite literally nothing to a behemoth larger than the film or television industries. This enormous change in the shape of cultural production has failed to make much of an impact on the study of culture more generally, partly because video games seem so much less culturally important than novels. No one has ever imagined the Great American Video Game. But video games have more in common with novels than you might think, and vice versa. Anyone trying to understand the combination of neoliberal individualism and righteous murderousness that characterizes our world today will do well to pay them some attention.

Two recent books, Ted Underwood’s Distant Horizons (2019) and Cody Marrs and Christopher Hager’s edited volume, Timelines of American Literature (2019), offer new ways of thinking about how literary scholars and institutions use concepts of time. Underwood’s book argues that the tendency to think of literary history as composed of large stylistic shifts between schools is undermined by an approach focused on computational analysis of stylistic features. Marrs and Hager’s volume showcases a wide variety of periodizing and temporal experiments designed to help us rethink the nature of American literature.

The various pronouncements of the nation’s dissolution seem to have been premature. Literary history is still very much within the nation, especially if one considers the realm of the middle- and lowbrow, or indeed the vast swaths of genre fiction. What has changed in literary history is the position of literature itself. The discipline of literary study (whether one thinks of it as literary history or literary criticism) institutionalized itself during a period of literary dominance. Now that that dominance is over—now that the field of narrative aesthetic culture includes television, film, and video games, and now that those genres dominate not only markets but the forms of representativity that used to belong almost exclusively to literature—what is the future for literary studies, either as a scholarly discipline or as an institutional field?

“World literature”, like all coins, has two faces: one the literary production that appears under its name, the other the critical industry that studies it. (Do not imagine that criticism is a parasite on world literature; they are symbiotes.) Section 3 of this conference directs its attention to the second face, proposing the creation of an “independent (literary) science” of world literature that would address, and draw on, the scientific (wissenschaftlich, let’s say) particularities of its object. If, that is, “world literature” is a particular kind of thing, then we must discover in precisely which ways it is particular, so that we can develop a method appropriate to it.

The rest of this essay devotes itself to an elaboration of that claim. Along the way I review the claim's implications for the study of literature in the world. I argue that assertions of fundamental difference, whether genetic or historical, reproduce the worst habits of Eurocentric thought.

Do we think that ideas only come in a limited number of sizes? Obviously not. And yet … it would be perfectly reasonable for someone from the outside to accuse us of so thinking. These are the constraints of the institution, and we reinforce them constantly: in, for instance, our evaluations of journal articles, including the ways we count them for tenure; but also, say, in the normal length of the normal end-of-term graduate seminar paper, which is merely a proxy for its potential future as a journal article. And so for historical periods, the graduate curriculum, and reports on the state of disciplines: we think very badly about institutions, when we do at all.

A key context for literary studies: the shapes and times of the institutions that sustain, permit, and organize it. This essay argues that we have not thought enough about the impact on concepts of literary history of the ways in which the literary profession organizes itself and finds itself organized by the curriculum, the job market, the professional associations, and the scholastic calendar. Each of these, I claim, exerts a distorting force on the ways in which we think about literature, and each of these, I show, could just as easily be imagined otherwise. The following practices come under fire: the interaction between norms of reading and the 15-week semester; the structure of curricula that lead from first-year surveys to narrowly defined senior seminars; the microscopist historicisms reinforced by the academic job market; the seminar paper format; our own ideological and conservative relation to the comforts of periodizing history.

Everybody Loves a CrisisThe story of what's what in asian american studies is like the story of the profession at large: no one thinks in a vacuum. But the current drift in literary scholarship toward questions of transnationalism and globalization arrives at shores long explored by scholars who work on Asian America and the Pacific. Much of this familiarity has to do with the material history of their subjects, the ways in which questions of diaspora and integration, relations between the flows of people and the flows of things, and the narratives of international politics and imperialist violence constitute the ground of Asian America and indeed of the concept of the Pacific as an ocean, a sea of islands, a limit to westward expansion, and the lubricated surface of a certain transcultural history. The critical insights that unfold from the labor of Asian Americanist thought, like those gained through the study of African America and the Caribbean, do not add ethnographic detail to some larger and fundamentally established picture of the history of the United States or global modernity: they change the picture. They reframe it.

Why did the coolie's body speak so forcefully to nineteenth-century America of its future? And how did that body's loquacious, obscene ventriloquism shape the imaginary scaffolding of America's utopias, its science fictions? This essay answers those questions by reading Arthur Vinton's Looking Further Backward (1890), one of the first American novels to imagine a Chinese military invasion of the United States.

Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, we can locate world literature as a concept – and as the subject of academic discourse, book titles, conferences, and so on – in the eye of two seemingly incompatible modes of appearance: as a feeling or attitude provoked by intensive close reading of individual texts, tuned to the frequency of their transnational effects and imaginations; or as a discourse and field of social formation, generated by the circulation and development of literary genres, micro-genres, and representational or stylistic forms across the boundaries of nation, culture, and time. At stake in that difference is the meaning of world literature today: its uses, and its very being. That one of these approaches borrows some of its habits from the socialsciences – so often a neutral description of consumption, production, and exchange at the macro-comparative level – means that world literature cannot be seen as simply the linked literary counterpart to globalization studies. That is: there is no easy way to think world literature and globalization studies, partly because the latter has so strongly been associated with social-scientific and positivist approaches to the study of the economic and political transformations that have occurred under its name. This much is suggested by the vast resistance among literary humanists to social-scientific or pseudo-scientific approaches to literary study, a resistance made up of equal parts attraction and repulsion, as the prestige of systems theory and world-systems analysis in contemporary theoretical work suggests (see Apter 2009). The emphasis on detail and singularity undergirding the standard methodologies of contemporary literary criticism – the “heuristic of close reading and attention to poetic figuralism” that governs it (Apter 2009: 44) – stems in part from a theory of literature and, more generally, of the aesthetic that has, since Kant, imagined the literary as a site of imaginative escape and play, a form of indifference or even resistance to the market and to exchange. Such resistance operates best at close scales of analysis, where the object’s potential distance (and liberation) from history of all types is assured by readings that discover in it the significant excesses of signification that constitute the work’s originality, its transformations of the ideological and historical substrates surrounding it.

* 1 * She originality of the Brechtian sign, Roland Barthes once said, comes from its always being read twice. "What Brecht gives us to read," Barthes wrote in 1975, "is, via a kind of disconnect, the look of a reader, not the object of that look; that object only reaches us through the intellectual (alienated) act of a first reader who is already on stage" ("Brecht" 265; my translation). Barthes meant that objects on the Brechtian stage never appear on stage as themselves. They are instead objects-facts, things, people, situations-as someone has perceived them, elements of a story told by an actor who performs a relation to the objects of his regard that subjects them, in advance, to reading. From the edge of the proscenium, the audience sees the reading, not the objects, and sees simultaneously the possibility of reading the objects otherwise. The Brechtian theater thus shows that an object is always someone's object, that any given thing, person, or situation has already emerged, prior to any single perception of it, as the "reading" of someone else whose first reading was simply to make this object the object of a look, thereby differentiating it from the seamless fabric of the real. Like the Brechtian sign, a translated text appears before its audience only after passing through the alienated act of a first reader. There it testifies to the awkward and complex relationship between author and translator, between the translation that appears and the