We are grateful to Comparative Literature Studies for mooting the idea of, and for providing journal space for, this discussion, and to Alexander Fyfe for convening it. We would like to thank our respondents—Sarah Brouillette and David Thomas, Maria Elisa Cevasco, Joshua Clover, David Damrosch, and Barbara Harlow—for their suggestive and challenging engagements with our work. We appreciate the candor and robustness of their assessments, and hope that our own responses to them in turn—equally robust, as befits the occasion—will be taken in the collegial spirit in which they are intended.
Our book attempted to resituate the problem of “world literature” as one better defined as the literature of the capitalist world-system, that is, “world-literature.” We sought to address world-literature by pursuing initially the literary-cultural implications of the theory of combined and uneven development. The implications of this theory for cultural analysis have received relatively little attention, even though it...
