Cultured Readings: Transcoloniality and Aesthetic Judgement in Global Literary Criticism

Abstract

My reflection revolves around the aporiae of critical appreciation in World Literature, suspended between an educated, erudite—or cultured—set of criteria and the expectation of extracultural validity of literature. I play, deliberately and ironically, with the double resonance of the adjective ‘cultured’, evoking concomitantly the profundity of cultivation and the limiting inscription in the boundaries of a culture (in the singular). Evoking the evolution of literary criticism as it constantly strives to enlarge its horizons and overcome limitations, be they of classical Comparative Literature, the postcolonial school, or new approaches to World Literature, I will argue in favour of radical aesthetic pluralism, and thus postulate readings that transcend the limitations of the cultured perspectives. Contrary to various attempts at formulating the premises of universal aesthetic judgement—contrary even to postcolonial critical frameworks—such radical pluralism, respecting the spheres of obscurity and untranslatability, creates sufficient space for the recognition of idiosyncratic values of texts, including, as I will later exemplify, those of West African Pulaar literature. Tracing a possible continuation of the historical line of criticism, which has constantly striven to transform and adapt its theoretical premises to include greater and greater variety of literary creation, I will argue in favour of transindigenous and transcolonial approaches as means of drawing, in the minutest details, the global map of literatures.