Reading world literature well requires defamiliarizing readers from their own culture

Evidence

David Damrosch suggests that world literature is “not a canon of texts but a mode of reading: a form of detached engagement with the world beyond our own place and time.” Theo D’haen glosses this definition in terms of the task of the world literary critic, which is “to bring out the strangeness of the work[,] … thus offering a new and different perspective … and in the process also disengaging the reader or student from his unconscious immersion in his own culture.” I would argue that this active idea of defamiliarization can profitably be brought to bear on Aslam’s novel The Wasted Vigil, which in its own right encourages a sense of overlapping histories and textualities. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 397

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes Damrosch/D’haen’s definition of world literature as a mode of detached, defamiliarizing reading rather than a canon.
• XREF: Defamiliarization echoes the Shklovsky/OSTRANENIE concept and the reader’s own guiding interest in what contesting vs. reinforcing Islamophobia looks like in literary form.