Although the concept can be traced back to the nineteenth century or earlier, world literature has become an increasingly significant part of English and comparative literature in the past two decades. While the inclusion of works from different cultures and nations has greatly enhanced the study of literature, some critics have lamented the consumerist impulse underlying the project of world literature, as with Emily Apter’s provocative book, Against World Literature, which has challenged the field’s inability to account for “untranslatability.” In this essay, Robert Tally discusses the use and disadvantages of world literature, citing both proponents and the detractors, and discussing his own attraction to Weltliteratur as a way of subverting the intensive nationalism of American Studies. Drawing upon earlier visions of Goethe, Marx, Auerbach, and Said, along with recent critics such as Franco Moretti, Pascale Casanova, and David Damrosch, Tally traces the trajectory of his postnationalist vision of a world literature that may simultaneously preserve cultural specificity without fetishizing it and engender transcultural connections without effacing difference, thus serving comparative literary studies in an age of globalization.