Abstract
To frame the introduction of individual chapters, I discuss globalization as the economic, ideological, and intellectual ecosystem, in which literary studies—both in metropolises and peripheries—rediscovered Goethe’s Weltliteratur. World literature was reinterpreted either as liberating circulation and cross-cultural dialogism or hegemony of the literary world-system. Goethe initiated a meta-discourse on world literature that influenced transnational literary practices during the successive cycles of global capitalism. He expected literary circulation to enable an equal dialogue between nations, networking of the educated elite, and universal recognition of belated or (semi-)peripheral literatures. Marxism exposed Goethe’s concept as an ideologeme of European bourgeoisie’s global hegemony. Torn between dialogism and hegemony, the process of “worlding” (Kadir) and nationalizing European literatures has taken place since the early nineteenth century.
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In addition to a detailed history of the term “world literature,” the discussion of recent concepts of world literature, in particular the world-systems analysis, the links between the formation of Slovenian literature and the world literary spaces was the main topic of my monograph in Slovenian Prešernovska struktura in svetovni literarni sistem (The Prešernian Structure and the World Literary System ; Juvan 2012a; for a review, see Tutek 2013).
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A similar referential shift is at work in Snoj’s reinterpretation of the expression “other,” which current discourse on globalization largely understands in cultural terms—as a distinctive feature that establishes ethnic, religious, racial, and other group identities. Snoj avoids not only culturalistic meaning of the other but also the theological and psychoanalytical ones. To him, the “other of literature that exists in the language [… is] the unspeakable.” To sum up, Snoj’s criterion of world literature is that a literary work entering the transnational canon opens up a world of being and articulates what remains unspeakable in other discourses (70). With this conclusion, Snoj’s essay comes close to the contemporaneous notion of singularity as proposed by Clark and Attridge.
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Juvan, M. (2019). Introduction. In: Worlding a Peripheral Literature. Canon and World Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9405-9_1
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