Ellipses Of World Literature

Abstract

Recent reflections on the methods and scope of World Literature perpetuate a century-long discussion on the disciplinary and pedagogical aims of Comparative Literature - a discussion that specifically and persistently involves the multivalent figures of the ellipse and the ellipsis. In pressing the use of these 'ellipses' in the scholarship, a usage that oscillates between rhetoric and geometry, the present paper draws out the varied senses implicit in the ongoing history of defining both Comparative Literature and, consequently, World Literature.