The Opportunities and Challenges of World Literature: An Interview with Martin Puchner

Martin Puchner is Byron and Anita Wien Professor of Drama and of English and Comparative Literature at Harvard University, and general editor of The Norton Anthology of World Literature. Puchner has published extensively on drama, modernism, philosophy, and world literature. He also co-teaches a HarvardX MOOC-Masterpieces of World Literature. Chen Junsong, a Fulbright visiting scholar at Harvard University (2018-2019), interviewed Puchner on a wide range of topics, including world literature, comparative literature, canon, literary anthology, literary theory, translation, etc. Puchner ascribes the rise of world literature in the 1990s to globalization, immigration, and the restructuring of universities, which brought opportunities for the current revival of world literature in North America. As for the relationship between world literature and comparative literature, Puchner argues that while traditional Eurocentric comparative literature gradually languished due to its narrow perspective, post-colonial studies which meant to challenge the former, limited in both its scope (focus on former colonies) and period (focus on the period of European colonialism). With its broader perspective and deeper sense of the history of literature, world literature presents itself as an alternative or a correction to these two paradigms.