Introduction
This chapter introduces the book’s critical terminology, including discussions of how to define world literature and its relationships with Jewish American writing. The chapter views world literature as a normative institution of cultural value, a construct of Euro-American modernity that systematizes literature through a global imaginary linked to notions of empire and colonialization. The terms “American” and “Jewish” could, at first, name certain knowable enclaves within this larger network. However, on closer examination, these terms are revealed to be fractured things that at times implicate writers within the world-making project of world literature and at other times lead them to advocate for its disavowal. In proposing a multidirectional reading practice, the book takes up the undecidability of translation and the cultural uncertainty of Yiddish in the US as ways to account for the shifting locations of vernacular Jewish culture.