World Literature and the Problem of Modernity

This paper aims to critically examine the problem of modernity in world literature and, more specifically, in the theory of world literature by Frederic Jameson, Neil Lazarus, and Nicholas Brown, who have formulated a new concept of modernity against Western modernity. For a long time, world literature has been regarded as a field in which the ideas and values of Western modernity were embodied. This led to the negative labeling of non-Western literature as less worldly and more local literature that falsely imitates the modernity of Western literature. So the problem of modernity, such as how to overcome Western modernity and rethink the concept of modernity radically, has become one of the essential issues in the recent theories of world literature because we can not achieve the further development of world literature without properly criticizing the existing concept of Western modernity. What is interesting in Jameson’s idea of singular modernity and Lazarus and Brown’s theory of world literature is that they criticizes the Western conception for modernity and suggests the new concept of modernity that pays attention to the proper problems of capitalism rather than the West. Moreover, their theory pursues for a new political reading on the modernity and universality of literature, overcoming the dichotomy between central and peripheral, western and non-western. Their theory of world literature has also significant implications for us who have been strongly influenced by Western modernity. It makes us realize that our own literature can be world literature when we thoroughly explore our own modernity and the problems of capitalism. It also recalls us the basic fact that world literature is a literature that can search for political possibilities in the modernity of our own world and its internal contradictions and cracks.