This essay proposes the concept of literary immanence as a new critical model for reading world literature from the perspective of the specific situation experienced by the subject as he or she encounters the world. The literary event is instantiated within three discursive domains: literary immanence, the literary situation into which the subject inscribes him the institutional determinations that turn the encounter into recognizably literary forms. Using the encounter between Antonin Artaud and Mexico in 1936 as an example of a literary situation that is comparative by definition, the argument develops around the subject’s loss of coherence when faced with a magical rea- lity in which language appears to come alive as literature.