Outside the Frame of World Literature? The Early Modern Examination Essay

This article inquires into the place of specific techniques and practices in the construction of world literature as a discipline, and argues that writing that does not belong to a genre with transnational reach can nonetheless play an important role in this construction process. The Chinese civil service examination essay (15th−19th centuries CE) was the product of an institution with world-historical significance, but the genre never participated in the world literary market—the “foreign trade” imagined by Goethe—in the same way that Chinese novels and poetry do. Yet the question of how these essays might relate to world literature is worth asking for three reasons: it constitutes 1) a chance to consider the possibility that a genre may enter into world literature by entering into that part of the world that is not merely literature; 2) an occasion to defamiliarize connections between technique and genre; and 3) an opportunity to reflect on literatures as systems with their own specific historical dynamics. Here we see the possibility of a truly comparative history of specific literary techniques such as free indirect discourse, and of a new approach to the question of cultural capital.