Philosophy and Literature, 2024, 48: 80–95. © 2024 Johns Hopkins University Press.
Rob Sean Wilson
WORLDING AND REWORLDING OF
WELTLITERATUR AS PLACE AND VALUE:
FROM ASIA INTO OCEANIA
Abstract. World literature entangled in the forms, values, terms, and
genres of comparative poetics makes the literatures of sites like Asia
Pacific, India, and Oceania better recognized in world creativity and
border-crossing archipelagic agency. World literature can become
enframed not just along “borderlands” of nations and regions but also
across “borderwaters” of entangled places, regions, and zones. Given the
increasing recognition of this postcolonial world-literary creativity and
agency—which implies taking seriously the reworlding power of these
literatures—world poetics will have to revise and decenter its literary
and theoretical frameworks.
“In any event, our philological home is the earth:
it can no longer be the nation.” —Erich Auerbach
1
T
he Germanic and internationalizing literary magus Johann
Wolfgang von Goethe conceptualized the long-lasting term
Weltliteratur in Enlightenment-era contexts of increasing relativization
after having been inspired by various non-Western literary works he had
read, including Persian lyric poems of sublime grandeur as well as some
lesser-known Chinese literary works. The ongoing construction and trans-
formation of world poetics thus had its foundation in both the reading