Postcolonial Literary Criticism and New World Literature Studies: A World of Difference

The present paper grows out of a large section of a doctoral research project that I carried out between 2017 and 2024 at the University of Liège, Belgium: in substance, my PhD thesis was in part designed to investigate whether the "world" of world literature as used by contemporary Euro-American theorists shared ideological underpinnings with the "world" ― not least of world literature ― prevalent amongst commentators aligned with (classic) postcolonial literary criticism. Via micro-analyses of the lexical perimeters and occurrences of the term "world (literature)" in influential field-related academic writings, the study revealed ― as does this paper ― that researchers had divergent interpretations of the unit "world (literature)" depending on their schools of thought in Anglophone literary scholarship. In fact, while the new world literature thinkers under examination seemed strongly inclined to dissociate a text's circumstantiality from a reader's/a critic's environment, thereby contending that the "world" of modern world literature had its own inner workings, the postcolonial authors included in my corpus assigned a more subject-centred meaning to the same word.