Talk:World literature

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literature has an affect on people every day, eventhough you might not know it. literature is text. narj is text. Literature with a capital "L", is a famous work of text. however small or large, what a person reads everyday, will stay with them forever. i would like to know your thoughts about the affects of literature on people's every day lives. email me at sjc_o6_chs@yahoo.com

thank you so much, sarah cummings

The second sentence of paragraph two in this article is plagiarized from the Amazon book description for a book called What is World Literature. - Sentence revised. WeltLit 02:36, 3 January 2007 (UTC)

Wrong definition
World literature is literature from all over the world? It is conceptually similar to world music? I strongly disagree. It should rather be defined as literature that had an influence not only in one country or literature that is considerer the best of the world. The article as it stands now is just wrong. Gunnar Hendrich (talk) 00:02, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

Revised and expanded DDamrosch (talk) 18:36, 27 December 2011 (UTC) why tho? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2601:204:8500:C53C:CDAA:F78D:501D:D11C (talk) 23:08, 6 December 2017 (UTC)

Basic logics
According to the article's first paragraph, "the world" includes: 4 regions that are usually considered continents (Africa, Asia, Europe, and Australasia), 1 linguistic or cultural entity ("Arabic"), 2 regions within a single continent (Latin America and the Caribbean), 1 country (the United States of America, which in the article is called "America"). A comment on this problem has been provided by J. L. Borges: "These ambiguities, redundancies and deficiencies remind us of those which doctor Franz Kuhn attributes to a certain Chinese encyclopaedia entitled 'Celestial Empire of benevolent Knowledge'. In its remote pages it is written that the animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies." ("The analytical language of John Wilkins") —Preceding unsigned comment added by Irigoye2 (talk • contribs) 04:11, 10 July 2010 (UTC)

Expansions
Noting that the "world literature" article was in danger of deletion from lack of references, and noting also the talk board comments on problems in the existing article, I've redone both the opening definition and the body of the article, including giving updated references and bibliographical information and links. DDamrosch (talk) 18:38, 27 December 2011 (UTC)

A History of World Literature in 9 volumes
The article by Yuri Vipper from 1985 references a 9 volume History of World Literature in which the first volume had recently been published. The Gorky Institute of World Literature, then under the auspices of the USSR Academy of Sciences, now under the Russian Academy of Sciences, was one of the key institutions involved in the publication of this massive undertaking. In view of the heterodox or dissident, i.e., Marxist, perspective of this publication, effort should be made to see if all nine volumes were published and in what languages they were printed in, in order to provide an alternative view to the orthodox views prevailing in the main article. See also the reference to Vipper's article in the publication from the USSR Academy of Sciences reviewing this 9 volume history. Georgi Plekhanov (talk) 09:49, 26 June 2015 (UTC)

Neutrality of this article
After nearly ten years I have revisited this article. Although it has certainly improved, I am still not sure about defining world literature just by the circulation "beyond its linguistic and cultural point of origin". Being just a simple reader myself, I am not aware of the state of scholarly discussion on this matter. But even disregarding my gut feeling about the definition, I have a problem with the fact that scholar David Damrosch is mentioned four times in the text, being mentioned one more time as having written a "valuable collection" of essays on this matter and can be found six more times in footnotes and literature. All this not on an article about David Damrosch or a some highly specialized subject but on "world literature". If we add that one of the more active contributors to this article was a certain DDamrosch, this makes me think he - even if he is an expert on the matter - might - even if unintentionally - be pushing his own point of view in this article.

Gunnar Hendrich (talk) 12:23, 4 February 2019 (UTC)
 * I think if I were you I'd just go ahead and make changes. You seem to make a coherent case for them. Pinkbeast (talk) 17:40, 3 March 2019 (UTC)