Through an extended reading of Canadian author Esi Edugyan’s novel, Washington Black (2018), this article aims to revise and reinsert both the practice of close reading and a radically revised humanism back into recent world literature debates. I begin by demonstrating the importance of metaphors of weight to several theories of world literature, before tracking how, with the same metaphors, Edugyan challenges Enlightenment models of earth, worlds, and humanism. The article draws on the work of several theorists, including Emily Apter, Katherine McKittrick, Steven Blevins, Edward Said, and Frantz Fanon, to argue that “terrestrial humanism” might provide a framework from which to develop a grounded, politicized, earthly practice of close reading world literary texts. The aim is not to arrive at a prescriptive or “heavy” methodology, but to push instead for a reading practice that remains open to the contrapuntal geographies, affective materialisms, and radically humanist politics of literary texts themselves.

中文翻译：

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地球人文主义与世界文学的重量：阅读埃西·埃杜扬的《华盛顿布莱克》

通过对加拿大作家埃西·埃杜甘的小说的延伸阅读，华盛顿布莱克（2018 年），这篇文章旨在修改和重新插入仔细阅读的实践和从根本上修改的人文主义回到最近的世界文学辩论中。我首先展示了重量隐喻对世界文学的几种理论的重要性，然后追踪了埃杜扬如何用同样的隐喻挑战地球、世界和人文主义的启蒙模式。这篇文章借鉴了几位理论家的工作，包括 Emily Apter、Katherine McKittrick、Steven Blevins、Edward Said 和 Frantz Fanon，认为“地球人文主义”可能提供一个框架，从中发展一种有根据的、政治化的、世俗的实践仔细阅读世界文学作品。其目的不是达成一种规定性或“沉重”的方法论，而是推动一种对对位地理保持开放的阅读实践，