Abstract

In October of 2016, an international symposium was held on the campus of Indiana University, Bloomington, devoted to the belatedly emerging work of the early twentieth-century author Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky. The phenomenon of Krzhizhanovsky’s re-discovery and introduction to English readers as a major figure of European Modernist literature, hidden from the world until the last decade of the twentieth century, provides an ideal scenario for how the institutions of publishing—through selection, translation, editing, design, and marketing—help to shape our understanding of which texts are included within the category of “world literature,” along with the very idea of what “world literature” means.