Caroline Levine is Chair of the English Department at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She is one of a team of editors for the new Norton Anthology of World Literature and the author of three books: The Serious Pleasures of Suspense, Provoking Democracy: Why We Need the Arts, and the forthcoming Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network.
Caroline Levine
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Writing on Public Books
How to Make Worlds
We might be tempted to think of the “world” in “world literature” as a spatial category. This “world” would designate the vast space beyond national borders, beyond the fiction of “Western civilization,” and even beyond empires that have reshaped power, labor, and language across the planet. “World literature” would be all the written and spoken […]
For World Literature
You could tell the story of literary study in the US as one long process of expansion. For hundreds of years only the Classics were considered worthy of serious academic attention, and strenuous objections followed the introduction of modern literature courses in the 19th century. While Latin and Greek “inculcate a certain manly and just […]
