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How do literary institutions deal with cultural diversity and the challenges of world literature, and how do they contribute to the construction of national and transnational literatures and cultures? In the last section of this anthology the roles of both national and international institutions are analysed specifically in relation to the formation of literary canons. How, for instance, is Flemish literature received and critically assessed on the other side of the national border, in the Netherlands? The work of Louis Paul Boon is a case in point, being both central to the canon of Dutch literature and an important element of its closely related Other (see Floor van Renssen).

Central to the formation of national and international canons, and consequently to educational institutions and their curricula, is the institution of literary criticism. Like so many other literary institutions, and in common with what Casanova calls our “literary unconscious”, modern literary criticism is largely national; “almost everywhere in the world”, Casanova writes, “the study of literature is organized along national lines” (xi). This institutional and unconscious nationalism has made us blind to certain transnational and cosmopolitan phenomena within the literary world, and criticism has contributed much to this blindness, but perhaps also suffered its consequences. This is surely the case with the Practical Critics whose influence on curricula and education in Britain has been vast, promoting a very limited canon of white, male national literature. Though these in reality very diverse critics have tended to be lumped together under the accusation of provincialism and nationalism, a new world literature perspective on their work reveals a liberal humanism that comes very close to the cosmopolitan outlook defined recently by Beck, which focuses on differences, contrasts and boundaries, and shows “an awareness of the principle of sameness in the principle of others” (see Gesche Ipsen).

This combination of liberal humanism, cosmopolitanism and a thoroughly nationally-defined perspective is, in fact, central to the approach implicit in one of Damrosch’s definitions of world literature, in which he sees it as “an elliptical refraction of national literatures” (282). In other words, a work of world literature is one that has traversed cultural borders and as such exists simultaneously in the two focal points of the ellipsis: the culture in which the work was produced and the culture into which it is received. The literary work, then, is as much about the “host” culture as it is about the “source” culture. This emphasis on both the national and the transnational perspective recalls Beck’s definitions of the cosmopolitan vision: “cosmopolitanism without provincialism is empty, provincialism without cosmopolitanism is blind” (7).

The figure of the ellipsis is central to world literature. It is also a key figure of thought in the postmodern or neo-baroque renegotiation of modernity that we find in Fuentes’s celebration of the polyphony and poly-centricity of the transatlantic novel (see Reindert Dhondt). Similarly, the figure of the ellipsis can be seen in Thomas Pynchon’s latest attempt to re-inscribe (ironically) the commodity culture of the market – the driving force behind global capitalism – in the parodic and constantly border-crossing form of his novel. As such Pynchon’s Against the Day may be seen as offering a critical strategy with which to confront the crisis in value systems and national cultures engendered by globalisation. Art is not autonomous, as the modernists claimed; on the contrary, art and literature are at once profoundly part of, and fiercely opposed to, national and international institutions, politics and current value systems (see Mads Anders Baggesgaard).

One of the most fascinating institutions of world literature is the annual “canonisation” of an internationally recognized, but not always nationally recognized, Nobel laureate. The permanent secretary of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Horace Engdahl, discusses in his article the motivations behind the awards made since the prize was instituted over a hundred years ago, and the ways in which these choices have been received. The awards, he argues, can be seen as firmly grounded in a Goethean conception of world literature, while at the same time incorporating the aesthetic values of a changing literary landscape throughout the twentieth century. For Casanova, the Prize represents, for good or ill, the highest honour the world republic of letters has to give; it is a standard for literary value in a universal literary space. Though such universality may be due to the importance accorded to the Prize worldwide, and to the fact that it inevitably stirs up discussions about the national importance and international relevance of the prize-winning authors, the list of laureates reveals that, for many, exile and migration were a condition of their work. In this sense, the institution of the Nobel Prize in the world republic of letters has upheld a non-nation-based conception of literature, and offers an always disputed, yet valued place of refuge for authors and literary works that have succeeded in crossing national borders. At the same time, Engdahl writes, the experience of working within an institution of world literature has shown that every nation has its own idea of what world literature is and what works belong to the international canon, while larger nations tend to assume that their version of the international canon of world literature must be the canon.

The challenge of the perspectives gathered in this anthology is to maintain a stereoscopic view on the national/transnational, provincial/cosmopolitan condition of literature and cultures that are constantly on the move, belonging simultaneously nowhere and everywhere.