Beyond expanding definitions of literature, though, what is the world that grounds world literature? Does the world of world literature consist of the social conditions in which it is written—nineteenth-century England for Dickens or twentieth-century Japan for Mishima? Or is its world the imaginative domain of its stories—Combray in Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time) or Shahryar’s palace in Kitāb alf laylah wa-laylah (One Thousand and One Nights)? For many of those offering responses, the apparent opposition implicit in these two questions is not quite as stark as it might seem initially—the world of literature and the world in literature are invariably entangled. When analyzing literary texts, we are often drawn to the interactions between political geography, which maps the social world, and aesthetic considerations, which map the particularities of literary form. And in turn, we are led to the intersection between area studies, including history, sociology, and anthropology, and literary studies, including language, linguistics, and aesthetics. Scholars ranging from Sarah Lawall to Franco Moretti and from Pascale Casanova to David Damrosch help to negotiate the implicit tension between locating texts geographically and aesthetically, and in a variety of ways, each ultimately enriches the contested domain of world literature.² At the intersection of numerous converging methods, world literature might appear as the logical outgrowth of discussions of transnationalism, postcolonialism, and cultural mobility, and as the opportunity to push literary studies into the twenty-first century.

Although it is tempting to see world literature as a domain beyond the boundaries of national literatures and languages, I want to suggest that the world of world literature has boundaries of a different sort. Even with its broadened definitions, world literature still presumes the centrality of an object understood as literature, capable of both traversing national differences and uniting a variety of textual forms. How, I wonder, might we consider the exclusions to this literary world? In what follows, I analyze texts not to suggest what they mean, but to ask about the conditions and terms in which they become meaningful as texts. This is less a matter of assessing how formal qualities determine meaning than of analyzing the contours of a world within which a text comes to be read as literature. What are the conditions for a text to be recognized as literature? In what ways does world literature define what literature is? How is a text included in the domain of world literature? Posing these questions also means asking about the normative limits of the literary: What falls outside, or on the margins, of world literature? How do presumptions about what literature is impact how a text is read? What practices are necessary to be recognized as a literary reader? And last, to return to the world in world literature, what world does literature make imaginable? Is there a force to the literary imagination that delimits how the world should be known? Is the world of world literature understood differently in history? This chapter is an effort to propose a different relationship between literature and the world. My argument is that the world of world literature is neither timeless nor universal, but contingent upon a series of practices, norms, and sensibilities integral to recognizing certain texts as literature and certain practices of response as reading.

In literature departments, when asked to situate a literary text, we tend to turn to the language or national tradition from which it stems—English departments tend to deal with the Anglophone world, French departments with the Francophone world, and even departments of comparative literature reaffirm, to some extent, the analysis of texts within national or linguistic canons. Rather than see the language or national tradition in which a text is written as the determinant of its meaning, I am arguing here for an analysis of the category of literature as it plays out in the world of readers. In doing so, I focus less on a text than on the practices that consecrate it as a literary object, and I thus consider the contingency of literature within the world in which it is read. A history of the category is ultimately a call for a more robust and embedded literary history—one that entangles literature and the world by considering the transformation of publics, reading practices, and institutions as they are situated over time. This embedded history situates literature within and among the competing traditions and sensibilities inflecting how the category comes to matter in the world, and it considers world literature as the negotiated site between those deemed readers and those unrecognizable as such.

Against any metaphysical postulation of what literature is, this chapter traces predominant paradigms in the field of world literature, all in an effort to investigate the relationship between worldliness, secularism, and the conditions of belonging in the world republic of letters. In the first half of the chapter, I address world literature as pertains to recognition—initially in the Nobel Prize speech for the Egyptian novelist, Naguib Mahfouz, and then in Pascale Casanova’s conception of world literary space. And in the second half of the chapter, I consider the world implicit in Edward Said’s notion of worldliness and secular criticism. I frame each of these two poles, world literary space and secular criticism, in the context of the controversy surrounding a novel by the Syrian writer Haydar Haydar. Looking closely at responses to this literary scandal, I ask about who or what speaks on behalf of literature and who is excluded from its domain. By framing literature as a contested category between interpretative communities, I move here from a world understood in terms of nation-states and languages to a world understood in terms of sensibilities delimited and cultivated through literature. And I move from a world of literary works and celebrated authors to a world of those impacted by the social life of a text. At its most ambitious, this first chapter is an argument that the world of world literature may not be as universal and timeless as we are often led to believe.

At first glance, the world quite explicitly described in the novel would appear to align with the world in which the novel is received. As it tends to be understood, the novel bespeaks intellectuals’ discontent with postcolonial states in the Middle East and with the increasing visibility of Islamic movements as a force in the public sphere. The founding of the Islamic Republic in Iran, the rise of the FIS in Algeria, and the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan all tend to be seen as the basis for the rise of religion across the region. Both Haydar’s novel and Hafez’s article share in their apparent embrace of this conventional account and the world it describes—a world torn between the secular left and the rise of religion.

When Hafez writes his passionate article on the pages of the New Left Review, he is notably less concerned with the story in the novel than with the story of the novel’s reception—and in particular its reception in Egypt, years after the initial publication, by an audience less than admiring of Haydar’s work. Walīmah li-a‘shāb al-baḥr was first published in Cyprus in 1983 to immediate critical acclaim. Subsequent editions appeared in Damascus and Beirut, and in 2000 the Egyptian Ministry of Culture reprinted the novel in a series dedicated to modern Arabic literature. As Hafez’s account has it, Muhammad ‘Abbas, working for the Egyptian newspaper, al-Sha‘b (The People), published scathing condemnations of the novel that claimed it was, in effect, blasphemous. The accusations were especially pointed—according to those incensed by the novel, Haydar juxtaposed a reference to the Qur’an with an expletive.⁴ Contentious as the accusations were, they revolved around what many in the literary community understood to be the decontextualization of select passages. Nonetheless, the reviews and articles escalated over a few weeks, and bowing to rising pressures, the Egyptian government eventually discussed withdrawing the novel from circulation. Meanwhile, with tensions rising, a number of students protested the novel at the Islamic university al-Azhar. On the streets surrounding the university, rallying around a novel that moved them to action, they were met and fired upon by the Egyptian police. In the end, one hundred fifty protesters were hospitalized from wounds suffered during the attacks.

For a critic like Hafez, the story surrounding Haydar’s novel reads as a tragedy—the defeat of free speech, and more broadly, of “secular and rationalist culture” on account of a most curious misreading.⁵ Hafez laments the fact that Haydar’s work fell victim to calls for censorship, and worse yet, that many of the students protesting had not so much as read the book before taking to the street. “Ironically,” he writes, “given that the first word of the Qur’an is the imperative iqra’ (read!), students of the Azhar do not need to perform this deed before they demonstrate.”⁶ His comments echo responses to protests surrounding Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, in which critics commonly suggest that angry readers either misread the literary complexity of crucial passages or misunderstand the artistic play of a literary text.⁷ A critical reader understands not only the language of a text, but the appropriate manner of responding to and analyzing the subtleties of a literary work. What it means to be literate, in such discussions, far exceeds the bounds of linguistic comprehension—being a good reader, it seems, comes to entail a number of presumptions about the appropriate place of literature, aesthetics, and criticism. For the protesting students, literature is hardly the disinterested domain of poetic playfulness, formal innovation, and the infinite unraveling of an eternally complex text. Instead, literature delineates a field of representation, a semiotic ideology, whose apparent importance is enforced by the gunfire of Egyptian police.⁸

The conflict over Haydar’s novel reveals not only how certain stories matter differently to different audiences, but also passionate attachments to the category of literature. In this instance, many intellectuals perceived literature and the freedom of speech to be under attack. The debates following the events subordinated the violence against the protesting students to the violence that the protests were seen to have enacted on literature. The literary community tended to focus on the protesters as fanatical, uneducated zealots, whose grievances not only were misguided, but also resulted from religious indoctrination. When, weeks later, newspapers covered the fight against legal proceedings to withdraw the novel, they emphasized the intellectuals’ solidarity with the editors of the novel.⁹ In a curious twist of logic, the issue was framed as freedom of speech, but the speech to be defended was the literary text and not the students’ protest. What was at stake was ultimately a defense of a book from its public—in a word, a defense through which the literary establishment purged supposedly fanatical reading from its domain. In this process, not only did the logic of rights shift from protesting students to the rights of literature, but the students’ activism was itself relegated to the domain of the irrational. It was only by seeing the students as misguided and ignorant that they were understood to have suffered in the attacks. And even then, their suffering was seen to derive from the unfortunate conditions of their apparent indoctrination.

My point is not to argue that the students ought to be understood as having properly read the text, but to consider how it is that the category of literature is secured in the contention between publics. More than a matter of misrecognition, the story surrounding Haydar’s novel offers an account of who polices the proper interpretation of a literary text. From the pages of the newspaper to the orders of the state courts, the actions on the street quite palpably unfurl conflicting interpretations in the world of literature. Interpretation here implies not only a hermeneutic question of what a passage means or how to appreciate its aesthetic properties, but the dictate of how properly to respond to a text deemed literary. And what is at stake in this situation is not solely the physical attack on one hundred and fifty protesters, but also a symptomatic transformation of the students’ activism into the domain of the irrational. These students were not seen to be critical readers in the proper way—once positioned outside a literacy integral to making a recognizable interpretative move, they are outside the domain of the public sphere, free speech, and the logic of rights and freedom. Unwilling to respond as addressees of the literary text, they remain unrecognizable as readers at all—and as a result, drawing from Hafez’s terms, they are deemed outside the parameters of “secular and rationalist culture.”

For the students, the text matters neither because it participates in a broad conversation about Arab nationalism, nor because it demarcates a formal innovation in the modern Arabic novel, but because it is deemed blasphemous. And ascertaining its blasphemy is not necessarily a matter of reading carefully or closely accounting for the grammatical distinctions between terms—in fact, in the end, it might have little to do with the text itself. It is rather a question of asking how it is that a text has come to mean what it does for the protesting students. Correcting the apparent misreading by asserting literary knowledge ends up doing little except prescribing a particular understanding of the text. We could gloss over the situation, as Hafez does, by bemoaning the terms in which the text is understood; or we could suspend the judgment of what constitutes right and wrong, and ask how the response to the text comes to be negotiated socially. The goal in this clarification is not to broaden what we mean by reading or even to include the students’ protest as a form of reading, but to ask about the world in which texts acquire meaning—in this case, both the world that bestows literary value upon Haydar’s novel and sees the students’ protests as a threat to literature and the world in which the novel is understood as blasphemy.

If we view the controversy as a conflict over the category of literature, then we map a rather different understanding of what constitutes the world of world literature. The protesting students, moved to protest by the novel, are understood not to value literature in the proper way. They do not necessarily read the novel, nor are they necessarily engaging any questions at all pertinent to its literary value. But I begin with this story not to argue that world literature cannot account for these students, but to suggest that it prompts a consideration of the normative force of the literary.¹⁰ Critics commonly consider world literature as the accumulation of literary texts from across the world—it is the site at which Shakespeare, Goethe, and al-Mutanabbi (al-Mutanabbī) all come together in spite of stemming from different literary traditions; and it is a world, in most accounts, that has very little to do with the readers of these texts. But t...