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Genres have the ability to wander across borders, mixing local and foreign forms, as Franco Moretti has demonstrated in several studies. Genres can also make works more accessible to a foreign audience, and thus they are important to the understanding of international canonization and world literature. In my presentation, I will tentatively suggest that there are a number of works that use different genres and techniques to balance the strange and the familiar, so as to make their combination virtually unrepeatable.

Mads Rosendahl Thomsen is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Aarhus, Denmark. His book "Mapping World Literature: International Canonization and Transnational Literatures" is forthcoming from Continuum Books in the fall of 2008.