What Is World Literature? by David Damrosch
Published 2003 · 324 pages · 110,000 words · about 8 hours at an average pace · Essays & Criticism, Literary Criticism, Nonfiction
How hard is What Is World Literature? to read?
What Is World Literature? scores 51 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 55 out of 100
- Damrosch writes unusually lucid academic prose, but the material ranges across Akkadian epic, Egyptian love poetry, Nahuatl song, and medieval German mysticism, each arriving with its own names, titles, and philological apparatus. The vocabulary demands are those of a well-read generalist keeping up, not of a theory-heavy specialist text.
- Sentence structure: 50 out of 100
- Sentences are long enough to hold comparisons between multiple texts and translations but stay firmly subject-verb-object; Damrosch is known for readable scholarship. Nothing approaches the hypotactic density of the theorists he discusses.
- Abstraction: 60 out of 100
- The book pursues an abstract question — what makes literature 'world' literature — but answers it almost entirely through concrete case studies of specific texts, translations, and publishing histories. Theory frames each chapter; artifacts fill it.
- Information density: 62 out of 100
- Each chapter compresses a text's composition, discovery, translation history, and reception across centuries — George Smith deciphering Gilgamesh, the fate of Aztec songs after the conquest. Rich but paced for readers outside the specialisms, closer to The Sympathizer's density than to Écrits.
How What Is World Literature? is regarded
What Is World Literature? holds a literary regard score of 66 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.