The 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature and Hereafter: Questioning the ‘World’ of World Literature

This paper reflects on the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature given to Han Kang and attempts to envision the period following this event that arrived to us as a gift. This act of imagining the aftermath of the Nobel Prize is not about predicting which author will be the next recipient. Rather, it is about re-examining how the economic, political, and cultural landscapes around the Nobel Prize will transform, and how literature can play a role in the current global crisis through the lens of so called ‘Nobel Prize economics.’ Questioning and seeking to redefine the concept of ‘world’ in world literature, this paper, specifically, aims to move beyond the framework of concreteness and universality and examine how politics intervenes in the translation process of national literature. It also investigates the role of translation by questioning the correlation between world languages, represented by English, and other languages and the politics of language. Through this process, this paper seeks to re-evaluate what literature can and cannot do in an era of crisis as the language of hope, by examining various aspects such as the roles of an author and a translator, and the realities of publishing, etc.