![]() ![]() ![]() First, Benedetto was more sensitive than virtually any other theorist to the difficulties inherent in the attempt to foster an egalitarian, comprehensive, and trans-national literary methodology. As I read him, Benedetto contributed two central insights to the historical development of world literature, insights that remain valuable to the contemporary desire for a truly global approach to literary study. Benedetto's work was founded upon the belief that informed engagement with the literary text-attentive to its linguistic, thematic, and cultural alterity-can produce and support a burgeoning internationalism that will be social and political as well as literary. What Benedetto's "letteratura mondiale" theorized, and what his critical and philological writings put into practice, was a mode of oppositional reading in which cultural, historical, and ideological difference would counteract the consensus of the present in order to engender a more cosmopolitan and open society. This essay reclaims a forgotten milestone, the 1946 essay "La 'letteratura mondiale'" by the eminent Italian philologist and comparatist Luigi Foscolo Benedetto. ![]() The search for a methodology for reading world literature largely entails the development of new critical paradigms, but it has also occasioned a re-examination and rehabilitation of world literature's historical formulations. ![]()
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