World Literature According To Its Poster Children,
2026
Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts
World Literature According To Its Poster Children, Jernej Habjan
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
Some of the most influential pronouncements on world literature have been made by the kind of authors who are most likely to emerge as representatives of world literature once we agree on a definition, including Goethe, the young Marx, Tagore, Gorky, Hesse, Kundera, and the distinguished signatories of the manifesto for a world-literature in French. Breaking out of this vicious circle by referring to the authority of pure theorists of world literature is not the solution, as this would only pull us into a new vicious circle where most of these theorists would mostly remind us of the names that …
A Crisis For Utopia: Jameson, The Collective, And The Future Of World Literature,
2026
University of the Pacific
A Crisis For Utopia: Jameson, The Collective, And The Future Of World Literature, Trevor Jackson
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
Working with Fredric Jameson’s influential discussions of utopia and world literature, the essay suggests that the prospect of utopia is frightening and also possibly boring insofar as it threatens to drain away the already waning possibility of experience in a postmodern, globalized world. In this world, resentment of the present seems to go hand in hand with a nostalgia for a fictitious past, underscoring the difficulty of conceptualizing new social, cultural, and economic arrangements. Viewing world literature as a possible source of a new utopian thought, a utopia unlimited to its contemporary dystopian guises, the essay retraces Jameson’s pronouncements on …
Milan Kundera As A Representative And A Theorist Of World Literature,
2026
Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts
Milan Kundera As A Representative And A Theorist Of World Literature, Lucija Mandić
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
The article traces the evolution of Milan Kundera’s notion of world literature across his career, contextualizing his writings within major historical events, including the so-called liberalization of Czechoslovakia in the 1960s, the post-1989 transition of the former Soviet bloc, and the turn of the millennium. Throughout the years, but particularly after his own immigration to France in 1975, Kundera consistently tied the notion of world literature with that of Central Europe to emerge with a conceptual framework that enabled him to position (semi-)peripheral European literatures within the Western canon. In his influential 2005 essay “Die Weltliteratur,” Kundera ultimately reframed the …
Against Pleonexia: Auerbach, World Literature, And The End Of History,
2026
The University of Melbourne
Against Pleonexia: Auerbach, World Literature, And The End Of History, Simon During
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
Erich Auerbach’s essay on world literature, written in the early postwar period, has become central to our understanding of the field. This essay contextualizes Auerbach on world literature by approaching it through his larger project, which it thinks about in relation to scholars rarely considered in this context. These scholars are the French literary historians and critics Hippolyte Taine and Remy de Gourmont, and the German historical sociologist Alexander Rüstow. To place Auerbach at an intersection of these very different figures turns out to be illuminating. It both enlarges our sense of him and helps us better understand why he …
Small Nations, Big Debates: Empowering The Slovenes As A Subject Of World History In The Critical 1930s,
2026
Research Center of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts; "Lucian Blaga" University of Sibiu
Small Nations, Big Debates: Empowering The Slovenes As A Subject Of World History In The Critical 1930s, Marko Juvan
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
The article looks at how Slovene intellectuals and writers in the 1930s attempted to redefine the role of a small nation within the world-system in the face of global economic crisis, authoritarianism, imperialism, and the threat of fascist expansion. Three central interventions are examined in detail: firstly, Josip Vidmar’s culturalist defense of Slovenia as a nation defined by its intellectual and artistic achievements, which is contrasted with Edvard Kardelj’s Marxist reinterpretation of the Slovene national question as part of a broader anti-imperialist struggle; secondly, Anton Ocvirk’s peripheral model of comparative literary history, which emphasizes the creative contribution of small literatures …
The Proletarian Moment In World Literature,
2026
Norwegian University of Science and Technology
The Proletarian Moment In World Literature, Anna Björk Einarsdóttir
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
During the interwar period (1918–1939), an international literary movement emerged in relation to internationalist and socialist politics and political struggles. Writers around the world saw themselves as contributors to a new proletarian moment within the historical unfolding of world literature. This movement was international, and writers situated on the peripheries of both the capitalist core and the emerging socialist world looked toward revolutionary Russia and other centers of the socialist world. This paper focuses on three such authors, the American Richard Wright, the Argentinian Roberto Arlt, and the Icelander Halldór Laxness. During the interwar period, all three were involved in …
Zheng Zhenduo And The Problem Of Priority In World Literature,
2026
University of Tampa
Zheng Zhenduo And The Problem Of Priority In World Literature, Daniel M. Dooghan
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
This essay investigates how Zheng Zhenduo (郑振铎 1898–1958) developed a theory of world literature in response to threats to China both politically from without and culturally from within. Centered on an analysis of his 1922 article “A View on the Unification of Literature” (Wenxue de tongyiguan 文學的統一觀), the essay argues that although Zheng believed like many of his contemporaries in the transformative effects of reading world literature in translation, that does not constitute the entirety of his theorization of world literature. Instead, he accepted the first-move advantage of other national literatures in defining both world literary standards and literature …
Beyond The Great Wall: Zheng Zhenduo’S “Unification” Of World Literature At The Juncture Of China’S May Fourth And Post-World War I Era,
2026
Emory University
Beyond The Great Wall: Zheng Zhenduo’S “Unification” Of World Literature At The Juncture Of China’S May Fourth And Post-World War I Era, Wenxin Liang
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
This article examines Chinese literary scholar Zheng Zhenduo’s 1922 essay “A View on the Unification of Literature” (Wenxue de tongyiguan 文學的統一觀) as a counter-narrative to both imperial isolationism and post-World War I nationalist fragmentation. Writing at the intersection of China’s May Fourth Movement and the global post-war crisis, Zheng developed a theory of world literature that challenged both Goethean Eurocentrism and the compartmentalization of comparative literary studies. Through systematic analysis of Zheng’s theoretical writings, editorial projects, and pioneering work on folk literature (suwenxue 俗文學), this article demonstrates that Zheng’s project of “the unification of literature” operated on three …
An Arc Stretched Between East And West: World (Or Universal?) Literature In Maxim Gorky’S Publishing Utopias,
2026
University of Udine
An Arc Stretched Between East And West: World (Or Universal?) Literature In Maxim Gorky’S Publishing Utopias, Francesca Lazzarin
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
The Vsemirnaia Literatura publishing house was founded in Petrograd by Maxim Gorky less than a year after the October Revolution. Aligned with the objectives of the new regime, its mission was to translate and publish a substantial body of European and Asian poetry and prose, thereby contributing to the broad cultural education of the emerging Soviet generations. These ambitions clearly reflect a key element of Gorky’s conception of culture as well: for Gorky, culture in its broadest sense (encompassing literature, art, music, and science) had the potential to unite humanity under the ideals of peace and harmony. Within this new …
A World Without Literature? Tagore’S Words For His Times And Ours,
2026
University of Oxford; National Law School of India University, Bengaluru
A World Without Literature? Tagore’S Words For His Times And Ours, Salmoli Choudhuri
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In 1907, Rabindranath Tagore delivered a lecture on world literature to an audience in Calcutta, the then capital of British India. Amid powerful and intersecting forces—colonialism and nationalism, industrial modernity and mass poverty—Tagore’s position on literature was neither disengaged nor defensive, insofar as he related it to the human condition and the capacity for world-making. Far from staking a representational claim to world literature on behalf of Indian or Bengali literature, I argue in this article, Tagore reconceptualized the idea from its earlier canonical formulation by Goethe. He departed from dominant nineteenth-century philosophies that conceived the world as a spatial—and …
Reconsidering Karl Marx’S Concept Of World Literature,
2026
Leeds International Study Centre
Reconsidering Karl Marx’S Concept Of World Literature, Kenneth Cheng
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
It is widely assumed that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels regarded world literature as an epiphenomenal product of the capitalist world market, and therefore as a symptom of rather than potential cure to the crisis of modern society. However, this conflicts with the fact that they designated the Communist Manifesto itself as a world-literary production—the joint work of communists of various nationalities—and opposed it to the national limitations of German socialist literature. This article challenges existing interpretations by outlining how Marx and Engels incorporated the humanistic idealism of the Goethean Weltliteratur tradition into the theoretical framework of historical materialism. It …
World Literature: From Perpetual War To Perpetual Peace (And Back Again),
2026
ELTE Research Centre for the Humanities
World Literature: From Perpetual War To Perpetual Peace (And Back Again), Sándor Hites
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In this article, I address the relationship between world literature theories and questions of peace and war. I argue that the genesis of the concept of world literature in the 1790s was informed by profound transformations, in political theory, of the issue of the relevance and meaning of war and peace and their public perception. Theorists such as Wieland, Novalis, Jean Paul, and Fichte offered their concepts in response to the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, adjusting them to shifting frontlines and the change of military fortune. Goethe’s notion of Weltliteratur already reflected on the geopolitics of the post-Napoleonic age, …
Introduction: World Literature As World Crisis,
2026
Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts
Introduction: World Literature As World Crisis, Jernej Habjan
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
No abstract provided.
Book Review: Yamin Hu, The Contemporary Construction Of The Chinese Form Of Marxist Literary Criticism ,
2026
University of New South Wales
Book Review: Yamin Hu, The Contemporary Construction Of The Chinese Form Of Marxist Literary Criticism , Paul R. Patton
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
No abstract provided.
Worldbuilding,
2026
Trent University
Worldbuilding, Brent Ryan Bellamy
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
Entry for special issue, 'Keywords for Value and Culture'
Substantialism,
2026
University of Calgary
Substantialism, David Janzen
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
Entry for special issue, 'Keywords for Value and Culture'
Style,
2026
Simon Fraser University
Style, Clint Burnham
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
Entry for special issue, 'Keywords for Value and Culture'
Spectrality,
2026
Goethe University Frankfurt
Spectrality, Marlon Lieber
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
Entry for special issue, 'Keywords for Value and Culture'
Secularization,
2026
University of California, Berkeley
Secularization, Jake Orbison
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
Entry for special issue, 'Keywords for Value and Culture'
Rhetoric,
2026
King's College London
Rhetoric, Fintan Calpin
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
Entry for special issue, 'Keywords for Value and Culture'
