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Focusing on the reception of the two Nobel laureates Nadine Gordimer and J.M. Coetzee,this article investigates the literature prize as a national, and indeed Stockholmbased,phenomenon in Sweden. It makes two general claims. The first is that the press exercises a co-consecrating authority that both rivals and depends on the authority of the Swedish Academy. This becomes evident not least in occasional attempts by critics to deconsecrate a laureate. The second claim is that the dramaturgy of the literatureprize, beginning with the announcement in October and ending with the award ceremony in December, culminates shortly before the ceremony with the Nobel lecture,when the laureate is heard in their own voice. In an analysis of Gordimer’s and Coetzee’s lectures, the article concludes that they present sharply different attempts at performatively resolving the tension between literary autonomy and heteronomy.

With remarkable force, “decolonization” re-entered the academic agenda some ten years ago. Having been an ambivalent historical experience undergirding postcolonial studies in its emergence in the 1980s, “decolonization” today is wielded as a concept and a rallying call. One of its rhetorical purposes is to set up an opposition between morally objectionable and morally progressive ways of constructing and sharing knowledge, yet the content of the term is often vague. In this context, world literature has much to contribute, both methodologically and critically. If, on the one hand, there is a decolonizing potential in the very ambition to make the world’s literary cultures visible, the critical dimension of world literature scholarship makes us aware of its colonial genealogy. Taking Mazisi Kunene’s epic poem from South Africa, Emperor Shaka the Great, as its key example, this article discusses how the dual potential of world literature might contribute to a “decolonized” mode of literary reading.

In an attempt to conceptualise literary multilingualism—or just “lingualism,” to use Robert Stockhammer’s term—without reifying language boundaries, this article reads literary fiction as a negotiation of different regimes of comprehensibility. These negotiations occur (1) on the level of the story-world, (2) materially, in the mediation of the narrative as book artefact and (3) between these two levels. Lingualism, then, is notjust context-sensitive but context-constituted. The apparently anarchic freedom of literary language is held in check by regimes of comprehensibility that ensure that even nonsense will carry meaning. The article’s analysis of works by Abdulrazak Gurnahand Zoë Wicomb shows how they engage potentially transformative moments of (in)comprehensibility in what Pratt named the colonial “contact zone.”

With reference to the five articles in the special issue, this introduction reflects on the relative absence of Lusophone African literature from the mainstream of African literary studies. Because of the insular and backward nature of Portugal's colonialism, the protracted wars in Angola and Mozambique, and the sheer magnitude of the postcolony of Brazil as a center for the reception of Lusophone writing, this literature has followed a path of its own. However, although a fair amount of scholarly attention has been paid to the early anticolonial and nationalist generations of writers, this special issue updates the account of the Luso-African literary world by looking also at current developments in publishing (locally and abroad) and reception, especially in Brazil.

This open access book positions itself at the intersection of world literature studies, literary anthropology and philosophical critiques of 'world' and 'globe' concepts. Doing so, it investigates how literature imagines and shapes worlds for its readers through linguistically specific cosmopolitan-vernacular dynamics, both at the level of textual engagement and on a material level of textual production and circulation. Moving from textual analyses in Part One – 'Worlds in Texts' – to combined analyses of texts, media and agents in the literary field in Part Two – 'Texts in Worlds' – the concerns of these nine chapters range from multilingualism, genre and style to material forms such as the little magazine or the scrapbook archive and finally to activities such as travel (as a writing profession) and literary promotion. With this focus on practice – which geographically engages with Constantinople, China, Russia, western Europe, North America, southern Africa and India – contributors demonstrate methodologically how world literature studies can bring the empirically specific detail to bear on global modes of analysis. It is precisely through such a dual optic that the world-making capacity of literature becomes apparent., World Literatures: Cosmopolitan and Vernacular Dynamics

World Literatures: Cosmopolitan and Vernacular Dynamics