Epilogue

Summary

The epilogue surveys contemporary global fiction and alternate conceptions of world literature to stress the political, historical contingency of the Anglophone ambition to give formal literary expression to totality. Unlike their late modern predecessors, Italo Calvino, Jorge Luis Borges, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie delegate the task of crafting literary totalities to their readers, suggesting that one’s best chance of assimilating the world through text lies not in devouring a splendiferous Gesamtkunstwerk but in grazing across many national literatures. Recent trends suggest a privatization of world-making responsibilities; authors no longer claim the public function of rendering the world legible for their readerships, at least not within single works. I proceed from self-reflexive meditations on world literature in Calvino, Borges, and Adichie to explore the literary market in South Korea, where publishing houses have stayed solvent thanks to the evergreen demand for collectible sets of foreign literature in translation. Unlike the writers I examine in previous chapters, non-Anglophone writers frequently assume that the world is an entity to be read rather than written.