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47 - World Literature as Planetary Literature

from Part IX - The Worldly and the Planetary

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 August 2021

By
Sarah Nuttall
Edited by
Debjani Ganguly
Debjani Ganguly
Affiliation:
University of Virginia
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Summary

This essay argues for the distinctiveness of the call to the planetary in its twenty first century form, without discounting its historical antecedents. It considers nodes of a distinctive necropolitics related increasingly to climate change, which break with the world-now of 1989 and its aftermaths in contemporary theories of world literature. Issues of death and its contemporary modes are worked with, alongside figurations of water and plant life. The essay is cautious yet insistent that we enable a conversation about planetary form as literary form in thinking about world literature.

Keywords

planetarityhydropoliticsthe new necropoliticalHan KangAmitav GhoshLindsay Collen
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge History of World Literature , pp. 924 - 941
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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