Stories That Stuck

Abstract Scholars of world literature often treat a wide circulation as the implicit goal of any book or author, projecting onto them a will-to-circulate and thus viewing a reduced readership as a form of failure. I suggest that non-circulation can also be seen as potentially an aesthetic strategy or a cultural achievement. Some works display in either their explicit claims or their choice of form a resistance to circulation that is worth attending to in its own right. Drawing on Sarah Ahmed’s notion of stickiness and the case studies of the Babylonian epic Enuma Elish and the Medieval French romance Silence , I set out to reframe literary non-circulation.