LAUSR

As American publishing conglomerates and institutions have come to play an increasingly dominant role in world literature, dominant critical discourses tend to equate the “Americanization” of world literature with a process of aesthetic diminishment and devernacularization. This essay nuances and complements such accounts by focusing on the role of American independent publishers as curators of world literature. The “world literary vernacular” through which these presses construct world literary value contains five key elements: an insistence on modernist literary genealogies; an emphasis on regional (or at least subnational) attachments; an investment in oeuvres rather than in individual works or personal charisma as salient units of literary value; a decidedly unironic rhetoric that connects literature to a putative world republic of letters; and finally an emphasis on translatedness and the creative values of translation. The essay situates independent publishers as crucial participants in the contemporary world literature ecology.