How literature represents, constructs, challenges, and complicates identity — and how form and content work together to record the social experience of belonging, exclusion, resistance, and power
Literature has never existed outside of social life. Poems, stories, plays, myths, and epics have always been written by particular people, in particular languages, from particular social positions, for particular audiences, within particular structures of power. To read literature carefully is to read these conditions — not as external background, but as forces that shape what can be said, who can speak, whose stories are told, and how language itself becomes a site of struggle.
This chapter introduces students to reading literature as a record of identity, belonging, exclusion, aspiration, resistance, and social power. It does not reduce literature to sociology or politics. Great literature is not a pamphlet or a data set. But great literature is also not immune to the social world from which it emerges. The best literary reading holds both of these truths at once: literature has artistic form that demands careful attention, and that form is always shaped by, and sometimes resists, the social conditions that produced it.
The close reading skill at the center of this chapter is identifying how form and content work together to represent social experience. Students will learn to ask not only what a text says about identity and power, but how it says it — through whose voice, from what position, in what language, using what literary choices.
Consider two poems written on the same subject: the experience of arriving in a new country. The first poem is written in the language of the country of arrival, by a speaker who has mastered its conventions, and is addressed to readers who share that language. The second poem moves between two languages, uses syntax that reflects the speaker's first tongue, and is addressed to readers who may or may not share the speaker's cultural background. Both poems are about the same subject. Are they the same kind of poem? What does the difference in language, form, and implied audience reveal about the social experience each poem represents? By the end of this chapter, you will have the tools to answer this question — and to apply the same analysis to any literary text.
This chapter teaches students to read how literature represents, constructs, challenges, and complicates identity — including social position, language, belonging, exclusion, class, gender, race, ethnicity, nation, empire, migration, and power. The close reading skill here is identifying how form and content work together to represent social experience. The key questions are always: who speaks, in what language, from what position, and for whom?
Identity is not a simple, fixed thing. It is constructed, contested, performed, and revised — through lived experience, through community, through language, and through literature itself. When we say that literature represents identity, we mean something more complex than the idea that books contain characters who belong to various groups. Literature participates actively in the construction and deconstruction of identity.
Consider how different literary traditions construct very different ideas of selfhood. The Homeric hero defines himself through martial honor, lineage, and public reputation — identity is inseparable from social performance and communal recognition. The Romantic lyric speaker constructs identity through inwardness, imagination, and solitary feeling — the self is defined against society, not through it. The modern novel frequently presents identity as unstable, fragmented, or determined by social forces beyond the individual's control. None of these is simply "how identity works." Each is a literary construction of identity that reflects and shapes social assumptions.
For much of the Western literary canon, the default identity — the unmarked, universal human — was assumed to be male, European, educated, and Christian. Characters who did not fit this model were often defined by their difference from it: the female character defined by her relationship to men, the colonized character defined by the colonizer's gaze, the working-class figure defined by their distance from culture and refinement.
One of the major shifts in literary study over the past century has been the recognition that this "universal" was always particular, and that the identities it marginalized or rendered invisible were no less real, no less literary, and no less worthy of serious attention. This recognition has not narrowed literary study; it has dramatically expanded it, recovering suppressed traditions, amplifying previously ignored voices, and producing new literary forms that could not have existed without the opening of literary space to previously excluded experience.
Students should resist two opposite errors when reading literature and identity.
Reading every text as if identity — race, gender, class, nation — is the only thing that matters, reducing every literary choice to a social symptom and every character to a representative of their group. This produces shallow reading that ignores form, language, and artistic complexity.
Reading every text as if identity and social position are irrelevant, as if literature floats free of the conditions that produced it, as if "great literature" transcends its social origins. This mistakes a particular social position for a universal human condition.
Reading that takes both artistic form and social situation seriously, that asks how each illuminates the other, and that remains accountable to the text while being alert to the conditions that shape it. This is not a political demand imposed from outside — it is simply thorough literary reading.
Language is never neutral. Which languages are taught in schools, which are used in courts and governments, which are published and preserved, which are ridiculed or banned — all of these are expressions of power. Literature is made of language, and so literature is always caught up in the politics of language, whether it acknowledges this or not.
For many writers and communities, language is not merely a medium but a form of identity itself. To speak one's mother tongue is to inhabit a community's history, its oral traditions, its ways of organizing experience. To be forced to speak another language — through colonization, migration, education policy, or social pressure — is to experience a rupture in identity.
The Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o (born 1938) made this argument forcefully when he decided, in the 1970s, to stop writing his novels in English and write instead in Gikuyu, his mother tongue. In his critical essay collection Decolonising the Mind (1986), he argued that writing in the colonial language was itself a form of participation in colonial cultural domination. This raises a question that applies far beyond the African context: what does it mean to write in a language that is not your mother tongue, or in a language that carries the history of domination?
In many literary traditions, multiple languages or registers exist side by side. Diglossia refers to situations where a high prestige language (used in writing, education, and formal settings) exists alongside a low prestige vernacular (used in everyday life and intimate settings). This distinction has structured literary history in many cultures: Latin versus vernacular European languages in the medieval period; classical Arabic versus spoken dialects; Sanskrit versus vernacular Indian languages.
When Dante Alighieri chose to write the Divine Comedy (begun c. 1308) in Italian rather than Latin — the language of Church learning and literary prestige — this was a radical statement: that the vernacular language of ordinary Florentine life was adequate to the highest spiritual and philosophical subjects. This choice helped constitute Italian as a literary language.
Code-switching in contemporary literature refers to the practice of moving between languages, dialects, or registers within a single text. Gloria Anzaldúa's Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987) famously moves between English, Castilian Spanish, Tex-Mex, Nahuatl, and other registers, enacting through form the linguistic multiplicity of Chicana identity on the US-Mexico border. To read this text only in its English passages is to miss a central dimension of its meaning.
In situations of oppression or censorship, what cannot be said openly becomes as important as what is said. Literature under authoritarian regimes, colonial governments, or systems of enforced silence develops strategies for encoding meaning: allegory, irony, symbol, fable, and indirection.
The Soviet-era Russian poet Osip Mandelstam wrote a poem in 1933 that mocked Stalin — "The Stalin Epigram" — which circulated secretly in manuscript. He was arrested, sent to labor camps, and died there in 1938. The conditions of his writing — knowing the poem could not be published, knowing that writing it was itself an act of dangerous political witness — are inseparable from the poem's meaning.
Similarly, the spirituals of the American antebellum period used the language of biblical deliverance to speak simultaneously of spiritual hope and physical escape. To read these texts only as religious expression, without attending to the conditions under which they were produced, is to miss a crucial dimension of their meaning.
Class is one of the oldest and most persistent subjects of literature. From the comic servants of Greek drama to the impoverished protagonists of nineteenth-century realist fiction to the working-class voices of contemporary poetry, literature has always recorded the textures of economic life: what it means to work, to be poor, to be rich, to inherit wealth, to lose it, to aspire, to fail, to be ground down by labor or saved by opportunity.
Class in literature is not simply a matter of economic statistics. It appears in the texture of language: the diction characters use, the education they have received, the way they speak in public or in private. It appears in setting: the rooms characters inhabit, the food they eat, the clothes they wear, the transport they use. It appears in plot: which characters are allowed to marry whom, who goes to university, who goes to prison, who inherits, who works.
There is also a class dimension to literary production itself. For most of literary history, writing was an occupation available primarily to those with leisure, education, and financial support. The history of working-class literature is partly a history of writers who wrote despite, not because of, their social conditions: autodidacts who educated themselves, workers who wrote at night or on weekends, writers who worked in factories or fields and produced literature in their margins.
Reading literature with attention to who is writing, from what position, and for what imagined audience is part of reading class — and part of understanding why certain voices and experiences have been underrepresented in the literary canon.
Gender is one of the most thoroughly represented subjects of world literature, though not always consciously or critically. Across traditions and centuries, literature has constructed, enforced, questioned, and subverted ideas about what it means to be a woman or a man, about the social roles assigned to different genders, about the family structures that organize reproduction and inheritance, and about the possibilities and constraints that gender places on individual lives.
Much of the world's literary canon was produced by men, for male audiences or mixed audiences in which male experience was taken as the default. Female characters in these traditions are often defined by their relationships to men — as wives, mothers, daughters, lovers, temptresses, or idealized objects of male desire — rather than as subjects with their own complex inner lives and social agency.
This is not a simple condemnation of the literary past. Texts emerge from the conditions of their production, and understanding what was possible for writers to imagine — and what was not — requires historical understanding rather than simple moral judgment. But it does require that readers remain alert to what is represented, how, and from whose point of view.
Gender shapes not only who appears in literature but how stories are structured. Many traditional narratives organize their plots around male protagonists who move through space, have adventures, face enemies, and return home or die heroically. Female characters in these narratives are frequently stationary — they wait at home, they are the prize at the end of the quest, they are obstacles or helpers in the hero's journey.
When women writers — Murasaki Shikibu in eleventh-century Japan, Christine de Pizan in medieval France, Jane Austen in the nineteenth century, Virginia Woolf in the twentieth — began writing from female perspectives and organizing narrative around female experience, they were not only adding new content to literature. They were proposing new structures of attention, new kinds of plots, new definitions of what counts as an event or a conflict worth narrating.
Literature also constructs masculinity, and it is important to read these constructions critically as well. The literary ideals of warrior heroism, stoic endurance, emotional control, and paternal authority are not natural facts but historical constructions — ones that literature has both enforced and questioned. The tragedy of many male literary characters is inseparable from the impossibility of the masculine ideals they are attempting to embody.
Okonkwo in Achebe's Things Fall Apart, Willy Loman in Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, Hamlet in Shakespeare — these are figures whose suffering is partly the suffering of being unable to match the masculine ideal their world demands of them. Reading their stories as stories about gender — not only about individual character — opens new interpretive possibilities.
The following invented passage is designed to illustrate how language, voice, and class interact in literary narrative. Study it carefully before reading the analysis below.
Miriam had learned early to keep two vocabularies: one for home, one for school. At home the words came out rough and warm, full of dropped endings and doubled meanings her grandmother had carried from the islands. At school she flattened everything — sounds, intonation, the particular slide of certain vowels — until her speech was almost clean, almost safe. Her teachers praised her for it. "Articulate," they said, which she understood to mean: not quite what we expected. She became skilled at the crossing, moving between the two territories of language as smoothly as she could manage, losing something each time she crossed.
Spend five minutes writing what you notice. What words stand out? What is the effect of the phrase "almost clean, almost safe"? What does the teacher's word "articulate" suggest? What does "losing something each time she crossed" mean?
Let us work through the passage using the MGU Close Reading Model.
Race and ethnicity are not biological categories but social and historical constructions — systems of classification that have been used to organize populations, distribute power, justify domination, and produce collective identity. Literature both reflects these constructions and, at its best, questions them.
For centuries, racial categories were used to exclude writers from literary institutions and to dismiss the literary value of traditions produced by non-European peoples. The question of which texts were considered worthy of study — which authors were considered "literary," which traditions counted as "real" literature — was always already a racial question, even when it presented itself as a question of universal aesthetic value.
The recovery of African, Asian, Indigenous, and diasporic literary traditions over the past century has not been merely an act of cultural generosity. It has been a recognition that much of the world's greatest literature had been systematically ignored, suppressed, or dismissed for reasons that had nothing to do with its artistic quality.
When students encounter the claim that a text is "universal," they should ask: universal from whose position? And who decided? This is not an argument that all claims of universality are false, but it is an argument that "universal" claims should be examined, not simply accepted. Universality is often the label we give to the particular experiences we have not been trained to notice as particular.
The relationship between literature and national identity is one of the most complex in literary history. Nations frequently use literature to construct and maintain collective identity: national epics become foundational texts that define a people's origins, values, and place in history. The Iliad for ancient Greece, the Aeneid for Rome, the Mahabharata and Ramayana for South Asia, the Kalevala for Finland — each of these served not only as literature but as cultural definition.
But literature also frequently questions, complicates, or mourns nationalist projects. James Joyce's relationship to Irish nationalism, Gabriel García Márquez's relationship to Colombian nationalism, Ngũgĩ's relationship to Kenyan nationalism — these are all deeply ambivalent relationships, marked by love, frustration, irony, and critique. Literature at its most interesting does not simply affirm national identity; it interrogates it.
Colonialism is one of the defining forces of modern world history and world literature. Between the fifteenth and twentieth centuries, European powers colonized most of Africa, Asia, the Americas, and the Pacific, displacing or destroying indigenous populations, extracting economic resources, imposing European languages and cultural institutions, and constructing systems of racial hierarchy to justify their domination.
Literature participated in this project — often explicitly. But literature also produced some of the most powerful resistance to colonial power, documenting what colonialism destroyed, constructing alternatives to colonial narratives, and asserting the humanity and cultural dignity of colonized peoples.
It is important for students to recognize that much of the literary canon of European colonizing nations was written in the context of empire and sometimes actively supported imperial ideology. Shakespeare's The Tempest (c. 1611) features Caliban, whose name is an anagram of "cannibal" and who is often read as a figure of the colonized native — enslaved, controlled, resentful, and denied full humanity. Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719) presents the colonization of an island as natural and beneficial. Rudyard Kipling's poetry celebrated the "white man's burden" of civilizing what it called "lesser breeds."
This does not mean these texts are worthless or should not be read. But it does mean they should be read with full historical awareness. Reading The Tempest without attending to its colonial dimensions is a form of incompleteness. And reading The Tempest as Caliban rather than as Prospero — as a number of postcolonial writers have done — reveals meanings the original text both contains and suppresses.
Postcolonial literature — produced by and about colonized peoples, often in the decades surrounding independence — frequently works by rewriting colonial texts, recovering suppressed histories, and asserting the value of indigenous languages and cultures.
Achebe wrote Things Fall Apart explicitly as a response to the tradition of European fiction about Africa — fiction in which, as he argued, African people were voiceless, primitive, and defined entirely by the European observer's gaze. His novel presents Igbo society from the inside, with its own complexity, beauty, and contradictions, before and during the colonial encounter.
Aimé Césaire, the Martinican poet, wrote Notebook of a Return to the Native Land (1939) as an act of literary revolt against internalized colonialism — what Frantz Fanon would later call the "colonization of the mind" — that taught colonized peoples to see their own cultures as backward and their own bodies as inferior. Césaire's négritude movement asserted the beauty, dignity, and cultural richness of African heritage as a form of liberation from the colonial imaginary.
Read a colonial text and a postcolonial response together. Ask: What does the colonial text represent, and how? Whose perspective does it adopt? What does it make invisible? How does the postcolonial text respond — by rewriting, by inverting, by expanding? What does the comparison reveal about how power shapes narrative? This is not an exercise in moral judgment; it is an exercise in literary and historical understanding.
The academic study of postcolonial literature emerged primarily in the 1970s and 1980s, shaped by several foundational texts that students of world literature should know.
| Thinker | Key Work | Central Argument |
|---|---|---|
| Frantz Fanon | The Wretched of the Earth (1961) | Colonial domination was not only economic but involved the systematic destruction of colonized people's sense of cultural value — a psychological and cultural violence as well as a material one. |
| Edward Said | Orientalism (1978) | European literary and intellectual culture constructed "the Orient" as a space of exotic otherness defined in opposition to a rational, progressive European self — a construction that served colonial power by naturalizing European domination. |
| Homi Bhabha | The Location of Culture (1994) | The colonial encounter produces hybridity, mimicry, and ambivalence — a complex cultural space that is neither purely colonial nor purely indigenous, but something new that destabilizes both positions. |
| Gayatri Spivak | "Can the Subaltern Speak?" (1988) | The most marginalized people — those with no access to representation in colonial or postcolonial institutions — may be unable to make their experience visible within systems of knowledge that systematically exclude them. |
Migration is one of the defining experiences of modern human life, and it is one of the richest subjects of contemporary world literature. Whether chosen or forced, migration produces a particular kind of self-consciousness: the awareness of what has been left behind, of the difference between the world one came from and the world one is trying to enter, of the languages and cultural codes that do not translate, and of the complex negotiations of identity that define the life of the person who belongs fully to neither world.
Exile is the condition of being unable or forbidden to return to one's homeland. Political exiles — writers who fled fascism in the 1930s and 1940s, writers who fled communist regimes or Latin American dictatorships — often write from a position of painful double awareness: deeply attached to the culture they have left, unable to live within the political conditions of that culture, uncertain of full belonging anywhere.
Samuel Beckett chose self-exile from Ireland and chose to write in French — a language not his own — as a way of stripping language down, escaping the literary and cultural expectations that English carried for him. This is exile as literary strategy: the deliberate adoption of foreignness as a creative condition.
African diaspora literature — Caribbean, African American, Black British, and African literature in various national traditions — shares a set of historical conditions: the rupture of the slave trade, the Middle Passage, the destruction of African cultural continuity, and the centuries-long project of recovering, reconstructing, and creating anew from what remains. This is a literature shaped by catastrophic loss and extraordinary resilience.
Toni Morrison (American, 1931–2019) made the African American diasporic experience the center of her literary project. Her novel Beloved (1987) confronts the trauma of slavery not as historical background but as a present haunting — literally, in the form of the ghost of a murdered child. The novel insists on the full weight of what slavery was and what it continues to cost.
Derek Walcott (St. Lucian, 1930–2017) engaged the Caribbean diasporic condition — formed by African slavery, European colonization, and indigenous displacement — as the foundation of a new literature that is neither European nor African but something entirely its own. His epic poem Omeros (1990) rewrites Homer's Iliad and Odyssey from the Caribbean, finding in the ancient stories of displacement and return a structure for the Caribbean experience of loss and cultural making.
One of the most powerful themes in migration and diaspora literature is the impossibility of full belonging: being simultaneously too much one thing and not enough of another. The first-generation immigrant who carries the old country in their body and voice; the second-generation child who is neither fully the culture of their parents nor fully the culture of the country they were born in; the writer who is claimed by multiple literary traditions and fits perfectly into none.
This experience of unbelonging, painful as it is, has been extraordinarily productive for literature. The diasporic or immigrant writer often has a heightened awareness of language — because language is something they have had to fight for, choose, or lose — and a perspective on culture that comes from not quite being inside it. This makes for some of the most interesting literary voices of the contemporary period.
The themes of this chapter — identity, language, power, exile, resistance, belonging — appear across the full range of world literary traditions.
| Tradition | Form | Relationship to Identity and Power |
|---|---|---|
| West African Griot Tradition | Oral poetry and historical performance | The griot is both artist and keeper of social knowledge — speech as power, memory as cultural survival, performance as the site where identity is enacted and transmitted. |
| Japanese Mono no Aware | Lyric poetry, fiction, drama | The aesthetic of bittersweet impermanence, shaped by Buddhist philosophy, also functions as a form of emotional knowledge that can exceed social obligation and constraint. |
| Arabic Maqamat | Prose narrative | The roguish protagonist's extraordinary eloquence is both art and social strategy — language as the currency through which a person without wealth or status can navigate power. |
| Sanskrit Natya | Drama and performance theory | Classical drama's theory of rasa (aesthetic emotion) was developed within a highly stratified courtly context — the audience's social position shaped what emotions they were expected to experience. |
This final section brings together the chapter's themes by proposing a set of questions students can use to read power in any literary text. These questions are not external to literary study; they are extensions of the close reading skills developed throughout this textbook, applied to the social dimensions of literary language.
| # | Question | What It Reveals |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Who speaks, and who is spoken about? | Which figures have a speaking voice, an interior life, a perspective? Who is observed or described from outside, without access to interiority? |
| 2 | Whose language is the text written in, and what does that mean? | Which languages or dialects appear? How are they valued relative to each other? What does the text assume about its reader's linguistic position? |
| 3 | What social structures are visible, and which are naturalized? | Are the structures of class, gender, race, and power presented as natural and inevitable, or as constructed and contestable? |
| 4 | Who is the implied reader? | What does the text assume its reader knows, believes, and values? Who might feel included or excluded? |
| 5 | What is the text's relationship to power? | Does the text affirm, critique, satirize, subvert, or lament existing structures? Does it do more than one of these simultaneously? |
| 6 | What is absent? | What is not represented, not said, not visible? Whose experience does the text fail to include, and is this failure meaningful? |
| 7 | How does form participate in the representation of power? | Does the genre, voice, or structure reinforce or challenge the power dynamics the text represents? |
The village women came down the hill every Thursday to sell their baskets and dried fish at the market. They did not speak the language of the town; they communicated in gestures and in the patient, practiced silence of those who have learned that words are a currency they do not hold. The market master recorded their names incorrectly in his ledger, and they did not correct him, knowing it would do no good.
Before reading the analysis below, apply the seven questions yourself. Write three or four observations about who speaks, whose language is present, and what is absent from this passage.
A text that deals with race, class, gender, or power is still, first of all, a literary text. Its artistic choices — language, form, voice, structure, imagery — are not merely decorations on a social argument. Reading Beloved only as a book about slavery, without attending to Morrison's extraordinary formal choices — her nonlinear time, her ghostly presence, her syntax — is incomplete reading.
Equally, reading texts as if they exist outside social conditions — as if their language, their implied readers, their representations of gender or race are simply the universal conditions of human experience — is also incomplete. The claim that a text is "universal" should always be examined: universal from whose position, and at what cost?
A poem by an African American writer is not automatically about race. A novel by a female writer is not automatically about gender. Writers from all positions write about the full range of human experience, and reducing their work to their social identity is its own form of limitation.
A text that represents racist, sexist, or imperial ideology is not necessarily endorsing it. Literature frequently represents what it critiques, and the representation of prejudice, violence, or injustice is not the same as its endorsement. The reader's job is to ask what the text is doing with what it represents.
An author's personal identity — their race, gender, class, national origin — does not determine the politics of their text. Authors write across and against the positions available to them. Judge the text; contextualize the author.
Choose a text you have read in this course — a poem, story, play, or excerpt. Identify one way in which language, social position, or power shapes the text's representation of its subject. Use a specific quotation or textual detail as evidence. Explain what the detail reveals about the text's representation of power. Target: 150–200 words.
Write an analytical essay comparing how two texts from different cultural traditions represent the experience of belonging or exclusion. Consider: who speaks, in what language, from what social position, and for what audience. Use the MGU Close Reading Model to move from observation to interpretation. Target: 600–900 words.
Choose a text that represents colonial, postcolonial, immigrant, or diasporic experience. Research the historical context of its production. Write an essay that connects this context to specific textual evidence, using the MGU Context Model: text first, context second, connection third, interpretation last. Argue for a specific interpretation of what the text reveals about the relationship between identity, language, and power. Target: 1,200–1,800 words.
Here is a model paragraph analyzing how language represents social power. Notice how each sentence builds from the previous one, moving from textual evidence to interpretation.
In the market passage studied above, the village women's silence functions not merely as a descriptive detail but as a formal enactment of their social position. The narrator tells us that the women communicated in "the patient, practiced silence of those who have learned that words are a currency they do not hold" — a sentence that uses the economic metaphor of "currency" to describe a linguistic condition: language is not equally available to all speakers, and those without access to the dominant language are effectively excluded from the economies of public life. The word "practiced" is particularly significant: the women's silence is not passive but learned and maintained, which suggests a form of agency within constraint. And yet the passage ends not with the women's perspective but with the market master's ledger, which records their names incorrectly — a detail that enacts the power to name and mis-name that institutions hold over those they administer. The text uses the form of compassionate observation to represent a social condition it does not fully enter from the inside.
Claim: The women's silence enacts their social position.
Textual Evidence: The "currency" metaphor; the word "practiced"; the market master's incorrect ledger.
Explanation: Each detail is unpacked for what it reveals about the social condition represented.
Connection: The form of the narration itself enacts the distance it describes — observation without interiority.
Read the following invented passage carefully. Apply the seven questions from Section 39.8 to analyze how it represents language, social position, and power.
My grandfather spoke seven languages. He had learned them the way a man learns to swim in rough water — out of necessity, not pleasure. He could move through Turkish with the ease of someone who has never thought about it; he could bargain in Greek, tell a story in Ladino, pray in Hebrew, argue in French, file a complaint in Bulgarian. English he came to last and learned imperfectly, which mortified my father, who had spent twenty years becoming someone for whom English was no effort at all. My grandfather did not understand this mortification. He thought the ability to speak seven languages badly was worth more than the ability to speak one language perfectly. "Every language," he told me once, "is a different way of being afraid."
Chapter 39 has explored how the social conditions of literary production — language, class, gender, race, empire, and migration — shape what texts can say and how they say it. Chapter 40 turns to the question of how literature travels across those conditions: through translation. When a poem written in Persian or a novel written in Japanese is read in English, something has changed — and something is always lost and gained. Chapter 40 will teach students how to read translation critically, how to think about translator choices, how to work with multiple translations of the same text, and how to understand world literature as a system of circulation across languages and cultures.