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Abstract
Literary studies has taken a global turn through such institutional frameworks as global romanticism, global modernism, global anglophone, global postcolonial, global settler studies, world literature, and comparative literature. Though promising an escape from parochialism, nationalism, and Eurocentrism, this turn often looks suspiciously like another version of Anglo-European imperialism. This essay argues that, rather than continue the expansionary line of recent decades, global literary studies must allow other perspectives to draw into question its concepts, practices, and theories, including those associated with the terms literature, discipline, and comparison. As a settler colonial (Pākehā) scholar in Aotearoa New Zealand, I attend particularly to Māori literary scholars from Apirana Ngata, Te Kapunga Matemoana (Koro) Dewes, and Hirini Melbourne to Alice Te Punga Somerville, Tina Makereti, and Arini Loader. Their work highlights the limitedness of global literary studies in its current disciplinary guise. Disciplines remain important when they bring recognition to something previously marginalized, as in the battle to have Māori literature recognized within Pākehā institutions. What institutionalized modes of global literary studies need, however, is not discipline but indiscipline: a recognition of the limits of dominant disciplinary objects, frameworks, and practices, and an openness to other ways of seeing the world.

The discourse on writing and sexual difference in German Romanticism functions as a discourse of censorship. A philosophical justification for excluding women from the "author function" (Foucault) and for subjecting their writing to male control was elaborated by Fichte in The Science of Rights . Goethe and other men of letters developed aesthetic norms for women's writing that were based on a male perspective of appropriate gender roles for women. Women authors' self-representation and literary activity were shaped by gender censorship that they were able to subvert only superficially by such means as public disclaimers, accommodation to male-defined standards, and anonymous or pseudonymous publication. (JC)