Roberto Schwarz and World Literature

Book excerpt: First of its kind, this essay collection examines the intellectual trajectory of Latin America’s foremost literary critic and dialectician, underscoring its relevance for contemporary debates on world literature. The volume shows how Schwarz’s concrete analyses of Brazilian literature and culture offer a theoretical blueprint to understand the literary registration of capitalism’s combined and uneven development. Exploring concepts such as misplaced ideas, objective form, and volubility, the contributors show how the nuance of Schwarz’s interpretive practice can be productively remodelled into a program for world-literary studies. Throughout the volume, Schwarz’s unparalleled contributions to cultural theory, long neglected in the Anglophone academy, are rigorously and creatively debated. Roberto Schwarz and World Literature is a primer on literary criticism as concrete practice and an indispensable book for those interested in how literary form mediates social reality.