World Literature from the Perspective of “Small” Literatures

Endeavouring to systemise the trends in world literature researches, our paper spotlights the differences between the concepts of this pheno­me­non as embraced by “small” and “great” literatures. It also takes account of the Czech and Slovak line of thinking querying the conceit of world litera­ture as normative poetics or the standardised canon of “arch-works”and their heterogeneous discourses. The historical experience of Czech and Slovak comparative studies defending the independent values of Slavonic literatures suggests that there cannot be any arbitrary researches on world literature. With some exceptions and regardless of their terminologically and semanti­cally different interpretations of this specialism, contemporary theoretical concepts (as embraced by Emily Apter; Pascale Casanova; David Damrosch; Theo d´haen; Marko Juvan; Franco Moretti; Haun Saussy etc.) re-establish recognising world literature as an international research issue or a subject employing English as a universal means of communication. Imposing such notion would allegedly condone inequality as a kind of epistomological fra­mework to codify the binary opposition of “developed” and “underdevelo­ped” or “the centre” and “a periphery”. It was mainly Czech-Slovak structu­ra­list tradition (represented by Frank Wollman; René Wellek; Dionýz Ďu­rišin; etc.) that rejected national tradition as a natural grounding of world literature. Anchored in Central European intellectual atmosphere at the crossing of various highbrow movements, these “defensive” theories were linked with the structural concept of the Prague Linguistic Circle, letting alo­ne the multilingual tradition of the former Hapsburg Empire and the phenomenon of migration which implied the aspect of polyglosy and hete­rotopy as a breeding ground for comparative scholars. In our contribution we would like to draw attention to the approach of the Slovenian scholar Marko Juvan in his monograph Worlding and Peripheral Literature (2019), which highlights the importance of language and the significance of land. On the other hand, he draws attention to the ability of literature itself to create the world in the form of aestheticizing national images in the case of so-called small literatures.