The question "what is world literature?" is never neutral. Every syllabus makes choices about whose stories count, whose languages matter, and whose histories are worth knowing. Designing a truly world literature curriculum means reckoning with these choices explicitly.
Frameworks for a Decolonized World Literature Curriculum
The Goethe model (Weltliteratur): Literature that travels across national borders and becomes common property of humanity. Universal but potentially homogenizing. The Pascale Casanova model (The World Republic of Letters): World literature as a power structure with Paris (or New York, London) at the center and provincial literatures seeking recognition. Critical but sometimes too mechanical. The Franco Moretti model (distant reading): Study patterns across thousands of texts rather than close-reading a few. Challenging to teach but reveals invisible structures. The decolonial approach: Begin with the question "whose world?" and actively resist the hierarchies that make some literatures "world" and others "regional."
Explore literary traditions by region on the Genesis of Literary world map.