What Is a World? - 9780822360780

What Is a World?On Postcolonial Literature As World Literature\nAuthor(s): Pheng Cheah\nFormat: Hardback\nPublisher: Duke University Press, United States\nImprint: Duke University Press\nISBN-13: 9780822360780, 978-0822360780\nSynopsis\nIn What Is a World? Pheng Cheah, a leading theorist of cosmopolitanism, offers the first critical consideration of world literatures cosmopolitan vocation. Addressing the failure of recent theories of world literature to inquire about the meaning of world, Cheah articulates a normative theory of literatures world-making power by creatively synthesizing four philosophical accounts of the world as a temporal process: idealism, Marxist materialism, phenomenology, and deconstruction. Literature opens worlds, he provocatively suggests, because it is a force of receptivity. Cheah compellingly argues for postcolonial literatures exemplarity as world literature through readings of narrative fiction by Michelle Cliff, Amitav Ghosh, Nuruddin Farah, Ninotchka Ro.