[Eric]

The creation of categories is in interesting pursuit. If people switch off at the very mention of the buzz-word "translation", you have to trick stubborn translatophobes into reading translations by suppressing all mention of that dreaded word.

Also, you can provoke them by saying that they ought to stop reading all translations. This would put, for instance, all Christians in a quandary, as their whole religion is built on translations of translations in a series of translations compiled under the name "The Bible". You can do the same with the adepts of other religions.

Next, the translatophobes would have to eschew all those classics, such as Balzac, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Goethe, Mann, and all the other authors whose fat novels they keep boasting about having read.

Using the term "world literature" avoids the use of the them-&-us term "foreign literature", and indeed broadens the whole way of viewing it. The only remaining problem is access to literature, because obviously we can all access literature written in English immediately, while books, even from neighbouring countries to Britain, can only be read if they have appeared in English translation (except for a minority of people who read the originals).

But as has been pointed out on another thread, even literature written in English suffers from hierarchical treatment. So everyone´s heard of U.S. and British literature, while Canadian, Australian, N.Z. and South African literature rather fall by the wayside. Irish, Scottish and Welsh literature adopt a somewhat middle position, in this respect, sometimes getting sucked into the canon, sometimes not. Or individual authors are creamed off.