What Is a World?In What Is a World? Pheng Cheah, a leading theorist of cosmopolitanism, offers the first critical consideration of world literatures cosmopolitan vocation. Addressing the failure of recent theories of world literature to inquire about the meaning of world, Cheah articulates a normative theory of literatures world making power by creatively synthesizing four philosophical accounts of the world as a temporal process: idealism, Marxist materialism,