Institutional structures, not intrinsic qualities, produce unified literary fields

Evidence

It is possible, as a matter of contrast, to speak of a European Literature, for example, because European universities constantly produce and reproduce large numbers of intellectuals, each of whom knows several European languages, who can together, through a complex grid of textual exchanges, produce a unified body of knowledge about literary production in the various linguistic formations of Europe; this is supplemented, then, by a brisk industry of translations, back and forth. It is because of these institutional structures that a thing called ‘European Literature’ does exist, albeit with its own system of exclusions and stratifications, both as a comparatist discipline and as a unified object of critical knowledge. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 513

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Institutionalized ecocriticism canonized only American authors for over a decade — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 717