World-Literature, Commodity Frontiers, and Aesthetic Form

Abstract

This article speaks of a literary comparativism provided by the environment-making dynamics of commodity frontiers. How is world-literature imbricated in these movements? How do texts mediate the logic of commodity frontiers and how might this mediation be differently inflected by the specific political ecologies of sugar, coffee, oil, or rubber? To approach literature from this angle clearly resonates with Patricia Yaeger’s call to attend to the energy resources that make texts possible (2011). By responding to this call through the optic of the commodity frontier, I seek to underscore the necessity of understanding those resources in terms of the systemic logic and structural relations of capitalism as a world-ecology.