III.

CENTRE / PERIPHERY AS A CHALLENGE

CENTRO / PERIFERIJOS IŠŠŪKIAI

World Literature(s) and Peripheries

Pasaulio literatūra(-os) ir pakraščiai

Marko JUVAN,
Scientific Research Center of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts
Novi trg 2, SI-1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia
[email protected]

Summary
The original Goethean (cosmopolitan, but peripheral) notion of world litera-
ture as analogous to the capitalist world-system has become relevant to transna-
tional comparative studies: it implies a conceptual-evaluative background and
practices, media, and institutions that allow intercultural transfer, intertextual ab-
sorption of global cultural repertoires, and self-conscious production for inter-
national audiences. Since the cultural nationalism of the nineteenth century, the
theoretical or poetic consciousness of world literature, its intertextual coherence,
and its material networks have been “glocalized.” The literary world system is
accessible through the archives of localized cultural memory and particular cogni-
tive or linguistic perspectives, whereas centrality and peripherality are variables
that depend on historical dynamics and system evolution.
Key words: comparative literary studies, world literature, literary system, glo-
balization, cosmopolitanism, cultural transfer.

The recent intensity of the debate over the concept of world litera-
ture is a symptom of social and political shifts in literary studies under
conditions of globalization1. On the one hand, comparative literature is
challenged by the “shrinking world” and the neo-liberal ideology of the
free circulation of capital, goods, and people. On the other hand, it has to
respond to postcolonial and anti-globalist emancipatory movements. Such
conditions have also developed an awareness of the global mobility of
cultural products, their deterritorialization, singular local appropriations,
and hybridizations, and the massive variation of the same matrixes in dis-
parate parts of the world. This is the reason why literature, considered
as a global phenomenon, has become relevant to comparative literature.

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The debate on this subject has changed its focus: from disputes about the
under-representation of marginalized communities and peripheries in the
global cultural canon, which implied questioning the Eurocentrism and
occidentocentrism intrinsic to literary studies, the debate turned to the
problem of how the geopolitical distribution of power, with its centers and
peripheries, shapes intercultural understanding.
Of course, addressing world literature belongs to comparative liter-
ary studies’ oldest disciplinary constants and the notion of Weltliteratur
has been with us ever since the late 1820s. As is generally known, it was
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe that – feeling somehow deprived as a Ger-
man writer in relation to the French or English metropolises and their in-
ternationally renowned national canons – launched the concept of “world
literature”2. The historical consciousness of literature’s worldwide scope
thus had a rather peripheral, nationally biased origin, notwithstanding its
cosmopolitan pedigree and claims to universalism. The intellectual back-
ground of the idea was definitely established by post-Enlightenment cos-
mopolitanism, a belief that “in their essence” people are equal, regardless
of affiliations to various states, languages, religions, classes, or cultures.
Since the eighteenth century, cosmopolitanism has informed the lifestyles
of urban intellectual elites as well as conceptually inspired ethics and in-
ternational law, economic theories of the free market, political science, the
arts, and the humanities3. Coining the phrase Weltliteratur, Goethe – as
Marx and Engels later would – expected “world literature” to transcend
national parochialism through cosmopolitan cultural exchange. In accord-
ance with the ius cosmopoliticum from Immanuel Kant’s Perpetual Peace
(1795), Goethe thought that knowledge of other languages and literatures,
their deeper understanding, and openness to their influence would lead
people from different countries to mutual understanding and peace. The
ideologeme of world literature was invented to buffer the dangers of im-
perialism, cultural wars, and economic competition between national enti-
ties in post-Napoleonic Europe. However, even Goethe fueled his cosmo-
politan idea with nationalist anxieties and goals; after all, his Weltliteratur
aimed at the transnational promotion of German literature, which was fac-
ing strong international competitors and British or French cultural hegem-
ony4. Encouraged by the considerable foreign success of his works and
enjoying an influential position in culturally prosperous Weimar, Goethe
believed: “There is being formed a universal world literature, in which
an honorable role is reserved for us Germans. All the nations review our

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work; they praise, censure, accept, and reject, imitate, and misrepresent
us, open or close their hearts to us.”5
From his particular perspective, marked by German cultural nation-
alism6, Goethe – as one of the most outstanding cosmopolitans of the
Herderian brand – was experiencing world literature primarily as a vast
network of transnational interaction; that is, as a rise in the circulation of
literary artworks across linguistic and national borders, and increasing
cultural exchange between continents and civilizations. As will be seen
later on, Weltliteratur also appeared to him in the guise of the modern
capitalist market going global. The mutual understanding and intercon-
nections of literatures in various linguistic expressions through transla-
tions, theatrical performances, reports, and reviews; the creative response
to literary repertoires stemming from various periods and cultures of the
world (from the classical Chinese novel through Persian poetry to Serbian
folk songs) – Goethe considered all of this essential to the viability of the
German and any other national literature and to the experience of what
he called the “generally human”7. With his cosmopolitan idea of world
literature, in which all creativity appeared to be equal, regardless of its ca-
nonicity or linguistic or national provenance, Goethe discovered a deeper
meaning in many of his daily activities, such as multilingual readings,
identification with culturally distant literary characters or problems, moni-
toring the international reception of his works, establishing contacts with
European artists and scholars, or editing the journal Über Kunst und Alter-
thum, devoted to Weltpoesie.8 He also transfigured world literature into his
poetic principle, leading to a globalized imagination and world intertex-
tuality. Goethe’s West-Eastern Divan (1819/27), inspired by the German
translation of Hafez’s Divan (1812), is an example of how an Orientalist
intercultural “synthesis” can be intertextually inscribed in a literary text
from one of the literatures that were becoming nationally conscious9.
In the second half of the nineteenth century, Goethean Weltliteratur
evolved to the regulatory idea that shaped the new discipline of com-
parative literature, defining its transnational subject as well as methods
of examining international cultural relations10. In comparative studies, the
concept of world literature has by now obtained several meanings: (a)
the sum of literatures expressed in all languages of the world, (b) liter-
ary works with “generally human” values that transcend local, national,
and limited historical importance, which qualifies them as cornerstones
of the universal canon, (c) global bestsellers distributed in several lan-

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guages, (d) authors, texts, structures, and ideas that cross the borders of
their domestic culture and are actively present in other languages and so-
cieties – as “multiple windows on the world”11, imported originals, trans-
lations, the subject of discussions and the media, and sources of literary
influence and intertextuality, and (e) a system of interaction and interfer-
ence between heterolingual literatures and areas that shape international
or transnational literary processes12. After a period during which notions
of world literature as the global literary canon or history of inter-literary
relations and developments prevailed, the original Goethean conception
has recently come back to the forefront of comparative studies, especially
in the transnational approach. There are many good reasons for Goethe’s
comeback13. According to Goethe, world literature implies a network of
practices, media, and institutions that transfer international resources in
the home literary field, encouraging transcultural circulation of concepts,
representations, and intertextual absorption of global cultural repertoires
as well as self-conscious production for an international audience. Goethe
is currently considered a visionary mainly due to his symptomatic use of
economic metaphors14. Knowing that he was – at least through German
adaptations and interpretations – familiar with Adam Smith’s The Wealth
of Nations (1776), one cannot be surprised by Goethe’s interdiscursive re-
sponse to the “free market” ideology – for example, when expressing his
hope that the German “production” in England “would find a market” and
achieve “a balance of trade”15. In their Manifesto of the Communist Party
(1848), which is currently read as a description of today’s globalized capi-
talism, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels followed Goethe’s economic lead;
here they connected the global expansion of the capitalist market and
economy to the beginnings of the transnational system of world literature,
which was held to be formed by the exchange and interaction between the
spiritual products of national, local literatures16.
World literature, however, may not be reduced to mere interaction on
the international cultural market. It is also a category of ethical, political,
historical, and aesthetic thought. This category was shaped in the nine-
teenth century not only because of the development of communications,
transport, and markets and the expansion of international politics, all of
which was required by industrialized capitalism and imperialism, but also
in view of travel writing, newspaper reports on world events, archaeo-
logical and anthropological discoveries of pre-classical civilizations, the
broadening of the translation repertoire (including Egyptian, Mesopota-

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mian, Chinese, Indian, and Arabic literature), and attempts at reconstruct-

ing the sense of the original otherness in translations17. In order to fashion
an awareness of world literature and foster intercultural transfers, a sort of
localized infrastructure within European cultures was also necessary. In
addition to the media, such as reviews and journals that included transla-
tions, or theaters with an international repertoire, the sheer mobility of
books, manuscripts, and other cultural objects was truly instrumental,
much like their exchange, systematic collection, and cataloging, and the
encyclopedic ordering of knowledge about foreign cultures. Such net-
works “translated” (in Bruno Latour’s use of the word) remote foreign
objects, texts, and their representations in a multitude of local archives
and libraries, where their referential and contextual liaisons with origi-
nal spaces were adapted to particular epistemes and the strategies of the
receiving location – for example, the formation of Orientalist corpora in
western libraries and preparation of encyclopedias, such as Barthélemy
D’Herbelot’s Bibliothèque orientale from the turn of the eighteenth centu-
ry, which represented and systematized Islamic civilization for the needs
of the French metropolis18.
In the theoretical and poetic consciousness of world literature
(Goethe’s case), as well as in the case of establishing the media and insti-
tutional infrastructure for its circulation and representation (D’Herbelot),
there is a taste of a “glocalization”19 of world literature that led to its plu-
rality in as early as the nineteenth century. The need to speak of world
literature in the plural form becomes even more urgent due to the fact
that the Goethean concept of Weltliteratur was launched through the ide-
ologeme of “national literature” and that it was modeled by nationalist
cognitive centrisms. Ever since Goethe, world literature’s interactions and
universal canons thus presuppose extant or at least emerging national lit-
eratures as their basic elements. Inclusion of the national in the world,
the presence of the world in the national, and nationality as a necessary
condition for the appearance of world literature are symptoms of the inter-
locking ideologies of the post-enlightenment cultural nationalism, cosmo-
politanism, and the aesthetic understanding of art practices20. According
to Siegfried J. Schmidt, two complementary processes were characteristic
during the making of modern European literary fields in the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries: autonomization and nationalization21. Following
Pierre Bourdieu, it may be said that the ideology of aesthetic autonomy,
which was fed into texts, activities, and actors in the literary field, was

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actually compensation for the fact that (as shown by Balzac’s depiction of
the 1820s in The Lost Illusions) literary life became subject to the market
mechanism and political manipulations of public space in print media: the
value of artistic products was contingent, and the accumulation or loss
of cultural capital depended on the shifting interests of publishers, social
networks, and cliques and on their tactical use of the media22. The process
of nationalization, on the other hand, profiled literature as a crucial lin-
guistic and cultural attribute of the nation’s “imagined community”23. Au-
tonomizing and nationalizing literature invoked the “nation” as a cultural
hero on the ruins of the ancient canon and, from its Eurocentric perspec-
tive, generalized this aesthetic and national attitude to all literatures of
the world24. Following the logic of identity construction, nations as imag-
ined communities only became possible through their relations with each
other: while emulating the same discursive repertoire of the transnational
current of nationalist ideology, they sought their individuality through
relentless comparisons with and differentiation from other nations (here,
comparative methods in philology, folklore, and literary history were also
instrumental). Hence modern European nations were established within a
new geopolitical reality that was perceived as inter-national25; borders on
the newly imagined map of Europe were now drawn almost exclusively
by existing or emerging nation-states.
An example of these processes in one of Europe’s peripheries – Slov-
enian ethnic territory in the Habsburg Monarchy – is the poetry of the ro-
mantic France Prešeren (1800–1849) involved in devising the context of
national, “Slovenian,” or “Carniolan” literature. In addition to his national
self-awareness and cultural activity, however, Prešeren saw himself in a
larger European context. His poem Glosa (1834/47) tackles the relation-
ship between verbal art in Slovenian language and the local environment,
in which parochial bourgeois capitalism plays a decisive role26. Prešeren
reinforces his insistence on the poetic vocation by alluding to a set of
models of the world’s classics (Homer, Ovid, Dante, Petrarch, Camões,
Cervantes, and Tasso), who at first sight seem to justify the poem’s thesis
that art – in opposition to the logic of profit – is always bound to be so-
cially marginalized. Prešeren intertextually transfers world literature in a
Slovenian text written in a Habsburg province, thereby giving meaning to
both his own poetic work and the emerging national literature. With local-
ly perspectivized allusions to world literary classics, Prešeren accumulates
their cultural capital in his text, evoked by the “currency” of their famous

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names. For Prešeren, such a testimonio of world literary classics repre-

sents imaginary compensation for the plain social phenomenology of eco-
nomic capital. Generally speaking, through the formation of the canon of
world literature, the cultural elites of the romantic period spread their be-
lief in the transcendental importance and autonomy of art. With reference
to the canon of world and European literature, Prešeren also advocated an
autonomous order of the literary that inverts the principles of the capitalist
market27. From this we may conclude that the emergence of a peripheral
national literary system tends to imply a specific local understanding of
the global nature of literature, as well as the world imagination and inter-
textuality. The glocal inscription of world literature into Prešeren’s poetry
was embedded in a social network of “culture planning,” which also in-
volved other intellectuals pursuing the task of establishing national “so-
cio-cultural cohesion” among the bilingual and biliterary educated classes
in Habsburg Carniola28. His mentor and friend, the librarian Matija Čop,
took care of collecting manuscripts, books, and news about current cul-
tural events abroad, as well as studying the histories of many literatures;
on the other hand, through his vast correspondence, he spread information
on past and contemporary Slovenian literature among the intellectuals and
poets in Czech, Slovak, and Polish territory.
The emergence29 of the peripheral national literary field described
above is an example of how, in the circumstances of the bourgeois society
and the capitalist art market, national identity is established relationally,
through realizing its position among literatures in other languages and
within world literature understood as a common heritage of mankind. The
case could be explained by recent conceptions of the world system that
build on Goethe and Marx’s observations. I am thinking of Immanuel
Wallerstein, Franco Moretti, and Pascale Casanova. Elaborating upon
Marx’s insights, Wallerstein writes that capitalism, encouraged by new
technologies of transport and communication, made the economy glo-
bal by introducing forms of exploitation, labor division, capital flow, and
surplus value appropriation that were organized geographically and po-
litically. The world economy thus created and multiplied local state struc-
tures that regulated social tensions by both fostering particular cultural
identities (national literature having a key role) and embracing universal
patterns of the capitalist “geoculture”. In the growing international system
of global capitalism, which produced and spread geoculture, nation-states
were positioned unequally: whereas “core-states” as the sites of developed

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production could accumulate capital and control the geopolitical division

of labor, “peripheral” or “semi-peripheral” areas, whose means of produc-
tion were less developed and statehood was weaker, remained dependent
on those centers30. Hence the world system of capitalist economics with
its geoculture, cores, and peripheries shows many striking analogies with
the gradual formation of a “world republic of letters” from the eighteenth
to the twentieth century. On the one hand, world literature participates in
the transnational circulation of geoculture; on the other hand, however, it
is – parallel to the capitalist world-system – a complex field of asymmet-
rical relations and struggles for visibility and recognition. La république
mondiale des lettres is conceived by Casanova as a hierarchically organ-
ized semiotic space, in which the established and emerging literary fields
interact from unequal positions, either as centers of cultural influence,
where consecration of literary products for the international cultural mar-
ket takes place, or as peripheries with poorer cultural capital and worse
linguistic, social, or political possibilities for international literary break-
through31. According to David Damrosch, world literature is the space
reserved for the diffusion and flow of literary texts that, after having been
recognized by some global metropolis, exceed the linguistic boundaries
of their literary fields and become “actively present” in other languages or
cultures32. Drawing on Itamar Even-Zohar’s polysystem theory, Moretti
also portrays the “world literary system” as analogous to the world econ-
omy (although not identical with the history and spatial distribution of
economic cores and peripheries); it consists of influential productive cent-
ers and primarily receptive peripheries33. Nonetheless, according to Even-
Zohar and Moretti, strong and developed literatures, which now function
as centers of the world literary system, used to be peripheral in the phase
of their emergence (e.g., the French and English dependence on Classi-
cal Antiquity); without interference with peripheral productivity and the
resources of “small” or “minority” literatures (e.g., the global influence
of orientalism, bard poetry, Nordic ballads, Balkan imagery and folklore,
Karel Čapek’s robot, and Latin American magical realism), even central
literary systems would stagnate. No cultural system is self-sufficient and
free of interference34. It would be misleading to draw evaluative conclu-
sions from the asymmetries of cultural power described above. Centrality
and peripherality are variables that depend on historical dynamics and
system evolution; there are normally multiple centers that attract different
global areas to their sphere of influence and compete with each other for

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wider dominance; in this millennium, for example, Eastern metropolises

(China, South Korea, and India) are overshadowing the role of the US and
the Western world. Important artistic innovations are also occurring on the
fringes of the world system. Moreover, cultural transfer from metropoli-
tan source literatures to (semi-)peripheral target literatures should not be
reduced to Moretti’s neat formula of “a compromise between a Western
formal influence (usually French or English) and local materials,” de-
rived from his important and large-scale analyses of the European novel35.
While the formula may be operational at the macro-level of the transna-
tional literary market, which, with its wavelike diffusion of successful
cultural products, causes diverse peripheral fields to choose and adapt the
most demanded, appealing, prestigious, fascinating, or innovative global
patterns, it proves to be too superficial at the level of intertextuality36:
“strong” peripheral authors that are aware of their strategic borrowing
from a foreign literary repertoire and its grafting into the “local” conven-
tions tend to cope with the Bloomian “anxiety of influence” in many other
ways – for example, by ironic and self-reflective fictional presentation of
their systemic dependence on the world literary canon (Prešeren’s metapo-
etic sonnets that ironize his own romantic Petrarchism). Being frustrated
by their marginality or border position, small or peripheral literatures tend
to be more open and “nomadic” in their search for disparate world sourc-
es. Because of their often irregular development, they mix and transform
foreign transfers in very singular ways (e.g., Balkan Zenithism and Srečko
Kosovel’s avant-garde poetic constructions). Nevertheless, it still cannot
be denied that the path of a peripheral innovation to the metropolis is cer-
tainly more difficult, exceptional, and often delayed37, as Slavoj Žižek’s
move from the circle of the Ljubljana Lacanians through US academia
to the world theoretical icon might testify. According to Casanova, every
writer that seeks to enter the space of the world republic of letters depends
on the international prestige (cultural capital) accumulated in his or her
home language, traditions, and society – British authors, for example,
have much better conditions for starting an international career than those
that write in Slovenian or Lithuanian38.
Peripheries or semi-peripheries, such as central Europe, are not just
passively dependent on their in-between position and interferences from
neighboring world centers. These areas, too, contain their own urban cent-
ers (Vilnius, Warsaw, Prague, Zagreb, Ljubljana, Trieste, etc.) and their
respective literatures sometimes establish mutual contacts without the

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necessary intermediation of global metropolises (e.g., various Slavisms in

the nineteenth century and after the First World War). Artworks, authors,
techniques, and themes from one among the peripheral literatures are thus
also “actively present” outside their home literary fields, operating within
what Ďurišin called inter-literary community or centrism (e.g., Arab or
South Slavic)39. Without inter-literary transfers within such communities,
the world literary system as a complex network would collapse. The cul-
tural capital that authors accumulate through the reception of their works
within such multinational and multilingual areas may also pave their way
to the metropolis and wider international recognition. Globalization and
the postcolonial situation have created favorable conditions for regional
and global success of peripheral authors (not only modern) and allowed
them to self-confidently plan their writing for world audiences. For ex-
ample, the Trieste Slovenian writer Vladimir Bartol (1903–67) privately
considered his novel Alamut (1938) a potential global hit. The text was
conceived to become an international bestseller: it draws on Orientalist
historical knowledge, sets the story in exotic medieval Iran, displays eru-
dition, uses an easily translatable style, clings to successful genre patterns,
creates suspense, and addresses big issues of totalitarianism and conspira-
cy theory. In the very year of its first publication in Slovenian, Bartol tried
to offer his novel to the global cultural market. He submitted a screenplay
about Alamut Castle directly to the Hollywood film metropolis, but MGM
studios rejected it. Notwithstanding, Alamut later won wide recognition
and was translated into about eighteen languages (and in 2004 also into
English). Alamut’s entrance into world literature occurred due to a favora-
ble, although contingent, historical situation and thanks to “consecration”
in a global metropolis: in 1988, Alamut was translated into French be-
cause its story and setting coincided with the topicality of Islamic funda-
mentalism and terrorism after Khomeini’s revolution in Iran40.
In conclusion, I am returning to world literatures in the plural. The
plural designation has been used so far mainly for “great” literatures in
the world languages, which differ from “small” literatures with what Paul
van Tieghem once called “limited radiation”41. Nevertheless, my point of
departure is the problem of how the complex world literature mega-sys-
tem, with its linguistic variety and multitude of texts, could possibly be
cognitively grasped and represented. Even if we attempted to overcome
national literature’s atomism with Dionýz Ďurišin’s methodology of in-
ter-literary processes that take place in a range of culturally, historically,

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geographically, or politically coherent areas or, if we followed Moret-

ti’s proposal for “distant reading” (i.e., systematizing second-hand infor-
mation on foreign literatures)42, we would at best highlight only some
highly generalized hypotheses about the underlying “laws” of the devel-
opment of world literature. It is therefore necessary to agree with Zoran
Milutinović, who has recently considered that the history and theory of
world literature could only be fragmentary and appear through specific
viewpoints43. World literature is thus inevitably reflected in a plurality
of different versions and images. It may be true that the literary world
mega-system primarily exists as a network of transfers, interference, and
developing relationships between texts, conventions, and structural matri-
ces from different national literatures or inter-literary communities. None-
theless, it should be remembered that world literature also consists of the
media and institutional infrastructure, the materiality of texts, and, above
all, the canon of world literature (as a repository of cultural memory) and
the consciousness – theoretical, practical and poetic – of the interconnect-
edness and interdependence of the world’s literatures. Poetic awareness
of world literature is realized in literary texts in the form of intertextual-
ity and globalized imagination. The literary world system is therefore a
complex topology, which is cognitively and creatively accessible only
through the archives of localized cultural memory and singular cognitive
or linguistic perspectives. They show world literature as a set of variant
corpora, representations, inspirations, and classifications. World literature
is being constantly translated and presented in manifold localized inscrip-
tions, which are the subject of reflection and reworking in different sem-
iospheres. To begin with, canons of world literature are plural because
they exist only within particular literary fields and interactions between
them: each national literature or country has its own version of the world
literature canon, and any literature intertextually bases its production on
different selections from global cultural heritage. Any literature or liter-
ary history sees world literature through the lenses of how they perceive
their position within the global literary system. The different perceptions
of world literatures in metropolitan or peripheral cultural environments
condition even “national” schools of comparative literature, although this
discipline should in principle be the most cosmopolitan form of literary
knowledge. However, this issue is already the subject of another discus-
sion44.

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References, literature

1
John Pizer, Goethe’s “World Literature” Paradigm and Contemporary Cul-
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Snoj, Svetovna literatura na ozadju drugega, in: Literatura, 2006, 18.177, 61–
78: 65–66; Tomo Virk, Primerjalna književnost na prelomu tisočletja: kritični
pregled, Ljubljana: Založba ZRC, 2007, 184–187.
2
Johann W. Goethe, Goethes Werke in Zwölf Bänden, Vol. 11, Berlin & Wei-
mar: Aufbau-Verlag, 1974, 456–465; Johann W. Goethe, Some Passages Per-
taining to the Concept of World Literature, in: Hans-Joachim Schulz & Philipp
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says, Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1973, 1–12. On
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<http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol2/iss4/7> [20 Sept. 2009]; David Dam-
rosch, What Is World Literature?, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
2003, 1–36; John Pizer, 2000; Tomo Virk, 2007, 175–179.
3
Marko Juvan, Ideologije primerjalne književnosti: perspektive metropol in
periferij, in: Darko Dolinar & Marko Juvan, eds., Primerjalna književnost v 20.
stoletju in Anton Ocvirk, Ljubljana: Založba ZRC, 2008, 57–91: 67–77.
4
David Damrosch, 2003, 8; John Pizer, 2000, 216; Pascale Casanova, La
République mondiale des Lettres, Paris: Ed. du Seuil, 1999, 63–64.
5
Johann W. Goethe, 1973, 5. Later, too, it often turned out that ambitious, cos-
mopolitan writers from peripheral literatures (James Joyce, Derek Walcott, or
Tomaž Šalamun) were more strongly inclined toward global imagination than
those from metropolises (David Damrosch, 2003, 13).
6
Joep Leerssen, Nationalism and the Cultivation of Culture, in: Nations and
Nationalism, 2006, 12.4, 559–578.
7
Johann W. Goethe, 1974, 458.
8
Hans-Joachim Schulz & Philipp H. Rhein, 1973, 3.
9
John Pizer, 2000, 218.
10
John Pizer, Ibid., 214; Marko Juvan, 2008, 72–77.
11
David Damrosch, 2003, 15.
12
See: Dionýz Ďurišin, Theory of Literary Comparatistics, Bratislava: Veda,
�����
1984, 79–90; Dionýz Ďurišin, Théorie du processus interlittéraire I, Bratisla-
va: Ústav svetovej literatúry SAV, 1995, 11–37, 45, 51–54; David Damrosch,
2003, 4–6, 14–24; Marián Gálik, Concepts of World Literature, Comparative
Literature, and a Proposal, in: CLCWeb, 2000, 2.4: <http://docs.lib.purdue.
edu/clcweb/vol2/iss4/8>; Pavol Koprda, La mondialité de la littérature chez
Dionyz Ďurišin, in: Medziliterárny proces IV, Nitra: Univerzita Konštantína
filozofa, 2003, 251–265.
13
John Pizer, 2000, 213–214; Pier Paolo Frassinelli & David Watson, World
Literature: A Receding Horizon, in: Pier Paolo Frassinelli, Ronit Frenkel &
David Watson, eds., Traversing Transnationalism: The Horizons of Literary
and Cultural Studies, Amsterdam: Rodopi (in press), 1–19.

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III. CENTRE / PERIPHERY AS A CHALLENGE

14
See, e.g., Pascale Casanova, 1999, 27.
�����������
15
Johann W. Goethe, 1973, 7–8. See Bernd Mahl, Goethes ökonomisches Wis-
sen: Grundlagen zum Verständnis der ökonomischen Passagen im dichterisch-
en Gesamtwerk und in den “Amtlichen Schriften”, Frankfurt am Main: P. Lang,
1982.
16
Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, New
York: Cosimo Classics, 2006, 45–46.
17
Ginette Verstraete, Tourism and the Global Itinerary of an Idea, in: Ginette
Verstraete & Tim Cresswell, eds., Thamyris/Intersecting 9 = Mobilizing Place,
Placing Mobility: The Politics of Representation in a Globalized World. Am-
sterdam: Rodopi, 2002, 33–52; David Damrosch, 2003, 39–77; Peter V.
Zima, Komparatistik: Einführung in die Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft,
Tübingen: Francke, 1992, 211–213.
18
Bruno Latour, Ces résaux que la raison ignore – laboratoires, bibliothèques,
collections, in: Marc Baratin & Christian Jacob, eds., La pouvoir des
bibliothèques: La mémoire des livres dan la culture occidentale, Paris: Albin
Michel, 1996, 23–46; Nicholas Dew, The Order of Oriental Knowledge: The
Making of D’Herbelot’s Bibliothèque Orientale, in: Christopher Prendergast,
ed., Debating World Literature, London: Verso, 2004, 233–252.
19
Roland Robertson, Comments on the “Global Triad” and “Glocalization”,
in: N. Inoue, ed., Globalization and Indigenous Culture, Tokyo: Kokugakuin
University, 1997, 217–225.
20
Marko Juvan, 2008, 64–77.
21
Siegfried J. Schmidt, Die Selbstorganisation des Sozialsystems Literatur im
18. Jahrhundert, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1989, 282–283; see also Pascale Casa-
nova, 1999, 148–152, 260–265.
22
Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field,
trans. Susan Emanuel, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996, 20–21,
48–68, 81–85. Bourdieu is actually discussing the radicalization of this situa-
tion in the second half of the nineteenth century.
23
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and
Spread of Nationalism, Revised edn. London, New York: Verso, 1998.
24
David Damrosch, 2003, 6.
25
Pascale Casanova, 1999, 56–59.
26
France Prešeren, Zbrano delo, vol. 1, ed. Janko Kos, Ljubljana: DZS, 1965,
111–112.
27
Pierre Bourdieu, 1996, 20–21, 48–85.
28
Itamar Even-Zohar, Culture Planning, Cohesion, and the Making and Main-
tenance of Entities, in: Anthony Pym, Miriam Shlesinger & Daniel Simeoni,
eds., Beyond Descriptive Translation Studies: Investigations in Homage to
Gideon Toury, Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2008, 277–292.
29
César Domínguez, Literary Emergence as a Case Study of Theory in Com-
parative Literature, in: CLCWeb, 2006, 8.2: <http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clc-
web/vol8/iss2/1> [21 Sept. 2009].
30
Immanuel Wallerstein, Geopolitics and Geoculture: Essays on the Chang-
284
 CENTRO / PERIFERIJOS IŠŠŪKIAI

ing World-System, Cambridge University Press, 1991, 139–156, 184–199; Im-

manuel Wallerstein, The Modern World System, in: The Modern World Sys-
tem: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in
the Sixteenth Century, New York: Academic Press, 1976, 229–233; Immanuel
Wallerstein, World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction, Durham & London:
Duke University Press, 2004, ix–xii, 23–75.
31
Pascale Casanova, 1999, 119–178.
32
David Damrosch, 2003, 4–6.
33
Franco Moretti, Conjectures on World Literature, in: New Left Review 2000,
1, 54–68.
34
Franco Moretti, More Conjectures, in: New Left Review 2003, 20, 73–81: 75–
77; Itamar Even-Zohar, Polysystem Studies, in: Poetics Today, 1990, 11.1, 59,
79.
35
Franco Moretti, 2000, 58–60; 2003, 78–79.
36
Marko Juvan, History and Poetics of Intertextuality, West Lafayette, Purdue
University Press, 2008, esp. pp. 54–69.
37
Franco Moretti, 2003, 75–77. Even-Zohar (Polysystem Studies, 65) speaks
of the “incubation” period that is necessary for the interference of a peripheral
literature into a central one.
38
Pascale Casanova, 1999, 28–32, 63–64. – For a similar observation see It-
amar Even-Zohar, 1990, 59.
39
Dionýz Ďurišin, 1995, 21–24, 48–51.
40
Miran Košuta, Alamut: roman – metafora, in: Vladimir Bartol, Alamut, Lju-
bljana: Mladinska knjiga 1988, 551–597: 554; Miran Košuta, Usoda zmaja:
ob svetovnem uspehu Bartolovega Alamuta, in: Jezik in slovstvo, 1991, 36.3,
56–61.
41
Paul Van Tieghem, La littérature comparée, Paris: Librairie Armand Colin,
1931, 16.
42
Dionýz Ďurišin, 1995; Franco Moretti, 2000, 56–57.
43
Zoran Milutinović, Jasno opredeljen pojav in enotna perspektiva: ali je zgo-
dovina svetovne književnosti možna?, trans. Seta Knop, in: Darko Dolinar &
Marko Juvan, eds., Primerjalna književnost v 20. stoletju in Anton Ocvirk, Lju-
bljana: Založba ZRC, 2008, 223–238: 236–237.
44
Marko Juvan, 2008, 80–86.

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