Ireland and the Problem of Information. Damien Keane

the “worldliness” gotten at the expense of mundane, indeed worldly, horizons: “These great intermediaries are naively committed to a pure, dehistoricized, denationalized, and depoliticized conception of literature; more than anyone in the world of letters, they are firmly convinced of the universality of the aesthetic categories in terms of which they evaluate individual works.”⁷ This, for her, is the essence of literary belief, the sustaining faith in the value derived from successfully competing in world literary space.