World Literature as Property

Abstract

The institutional re-emergence of “World Literature” as a paradigm for organizing the verbal production of the world’s cultures is taking place simultaneously with a massive transformation in the international order of intellectual property law. This “second enclosure movement” is converting all forms of creative and cultural resources into commodities, private intellectual properties. As system, institution, or aspiration, the new “World Literature” represents one more way of not talking about the world, especially when it fails to recognize the material inequalities and imbalances that subtend creative production and the monopoly model of copyrighted culture that are the conditions of its own contemporary possibility.