Literary history outside the Gutenberg Comfort Zone

As this article argues, lyricism and narrativity are often expressed in nonprinted or non-written forms, which as such are often marginalized in the eyes of literary scholars, even comparatists. Comparatists are institutional heirs to a philological tradition that gravitated around the Gutenberg Comfort Zone of printed literatures in the European languages and genres. But a proper understanding of world literature should reconsider not only the notion of a Western-centred world. It should also reconsider the Western-centred (print-based and modernity-directed) notion of literature, and the production-anchored (rather than diffusion-oriented) sense of literary history.