Film as World Literature

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Redefines the theoretical and thematic contents of world literature by considering it in connection with film.

What gets lost when we understand film as essentially different from literature What gets lost when we think them essentially the same Does the constructed difference between literature and film also create social and political exclusions, exclusions that may exacerbate class struggle or exclusions of certain ways of thinking the future as different Film as World Literature seeks to undo disciplines and disciplinarity: the division between film and literature, indeed, conceals the possibilities of world by bracketing out undisciplined parts.

Contributors apply ideas of translatability and untranslatability not just as a linguistic exercise of transfers between language groups, cultures, and national origins but also as an approach to media and transfers between media. Is film a visual acknowledgement that literary language is, by definition, multilingual that is, is film a place where political conflicts, as Bakhtin observed, can be rendered visible Chapters discuss films relation to world literature not only by considering literary adaptations across nations, regions, languages, ideologies, and contexts but also by exploring films intersections with literary theory, narrative, history, genre, and experimentation.

Film as World Literature calls for recognition that while the category of world demands a radical defense in the face of risks to democracy, the world that literature and film combined bring forth must interrogate the conditions for a future politics of interaction, engagement, belonging, and difference.

Author Bio

Robin Truth Goodman is a Distinguished Research Professor of English at Florida State University, USA. Her many previous publications include Cinema and the Political Imagination: Third Cinema and Its After-Image (2025), Gender Commodity: Marketing Feminist Identities and the Promise of Security (Bloomsbury, 2022), The Bloomsbury Handbook of 21st Century Feminist Theory (2019); Promissory Notes: On the Literary Conditions of Debt (2018); Gender for the Warfare State: Literature of Women in Combat (2017); and Literature and the Development of Feminist Theory (2016).