Preliminaries --; Why study literature? --; "What's the story??" the relevance of literature to life --; The uses of the useless: comparative literature and the multinational corporation --; Approaches --; Macintosh apples and Mandarin oranges: discourse functions and dysfunctions in literary comparison --; Cuentos chinos ("chinese tales"): the new chinoiserie --; Cultural temptations in translation: Franţcois Cheng's francophone Cathay --; The persistence of Cathay: China in world literature --; A shift in cultural tectonics: challenges of geography the emergence of the southern hemisphere --; A cross-cultural perspective on the modern and the postmodern --; Cultural logics: the categoricalness of things vs. the Maodun of events --; A mestizo of the mind: Maodun in the writings of Octavio Paz --; The genial and congenial art of comparison prospects --; The insights of the outsider: the legacy of translation as afterlife --; The globalization of knowledge: comparative literature as interdisciplinary and multilingual discourse --; The glocalization of knowledge: the ends of the world or the edge of heaven --; The undisciplined discipline: comparative literature and creative wandering --; Synergies and synaethesias: an intraworldly comparative literature.