Crafts of world literature : field, material and translation

Early in 2012 we called for papers that would acknowledge the challenges of thinking about craft and of seeing craft itself as a kind of thinking. These aims could be meaningfully pursued only if craft and technique were understood to be the fundamental grounds for critical interpretation rather than subsidiary concerns for cultural critique and “textual analysis”. Such an understanding, we suggested, had been missing as much from recent conversations about world literature as from older conversations about Commonwealth and postcolonial literatures, and this to their detriment, since it is in craft that works are oriented towards and have knowledge of the world.