What Cities Enclose:

A Geoliterary Approach to World Literature

Abstract

After its reappearance on the literary scope, world literature has become such an inevitable paradigm in contemporary reflections, that, as expressed by Theo D’Haen (2012), “no other approach to literary studies has known as spectacular a success in the new millennium”. Paradoxically, this has also caused an entrance into an ongoing cycle of metadiscursive reformulation, which has distanced the concept from its own definition, methodology and boundaries. Towards grasping world literature spectrum, the present proposal encompasses certain theoretical notions around 21st-century literature, by following the representation of urban space in The Museum of Innocence (Orhan Pamuk) and Jerusalém (Gonçalo M. Tavares) as samples for contemporary concerns seen from a geoliterary angle