Peripheries and the World System

of Literature: A Slovenian Perspective

Marko Juvan
ZRC SAZU, Ljubljana

Recent debates have confusingly flattened the concept of world

literature to a presentist image of global literature, in which interna-
tional authors “born translated” into global English conquer the
international publishing industry1. In my understanding, world lit-
erature differs essentially from what one should rather call global
literature. Goethe’s sketchy writings of the 1820s and his celebrated
Conversations with Eckermann, followed by Marx and Engels’s
world-shattering Communist Manifesto of 1848 launched the concept
of Weltliteratur into international discourse interpreting it as an
emerging epoch2, what implies the historicity of world literature, its
spatiotemporal breadth. Many of its contemporary students seem
to have forgotten this. World literature is historical both as a con-
cept and as reality designated by this concept. With regard to the
historicity of world literature, it is symptomatic that the universality
implied in the notion of world literature originated from a particular
semi-peripheral position and at the conjuncture of the Enlighten-
ment cosmopolitanism, the Romantic cultural nationalism, and the
globalizing drive of the capitalist industrial revolution. The German
polymath world historian August Ludwig Schlözer first used the
word Weltliteratur in 1773 with reference to a periphery, i.e. Icelandic

1 Cf. Rebecca Walkowitz, Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World

Literature, New York, Columbia University Press, 2015, p. 3-4, passim.

2 Marko Juvan, “Worlding literatures between dialogue and hegemony”, in

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, vol. 15, n° 5, December 2013,

http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol15/iss5/11.

91
literature3. Furthermore, Goethe, the term’s internationally recog-
nized promoter, referred to Weltliteratur in order to lend a touch of
cosmopolitan universality to his writing, establish his position as a
“classical national author” in German lands and Europe alike, and
most importantly, help German letters, which he felt were lagging
behind more renowned Western literatures, achieve international
recognition4.
If properly understood as a historical category, the term world
literature designates a globalizing process that, since around 1800,
has established a growing system of cross-lingual and cross-national
circulation of texts that have been generally understood as literary
due to the western aesthetic discourse ideologically underpinning
this very process. As I elaborated in more detail elsewhere, Goe-
the’s comparisons of the transnational circulation of literature with
the world market and Marx and Engels’s explicit parallel between
the transnational expansion of the capitalist mode of production
and world literature (the latter connoting the global spread of the
Western bourgeois culture) are symptomatic. They allow for the
conclusion that the meta-discourse on world literature inaugurated
by Goethe reflected, gave sense, and programmed a new sociohis-
torical reality of the post-enlightenment European literary discourse
in which “literature was going global because of the exposure to the
capitalist mode of production and the accelerated development of
communication technologies”5. Thus, capitalism and its bourgeois
geo-culture have dominated the emergence and evolution of the
modern world literature ideologically and socio-politically ever
since Goethe’s influential uses of the term.
Notwithstanding the dynamics of cross-lingual and cross-na-
tional circulation, the historicity of world literature paradoxically
consists also of its trans-historical and normative appeal. The world
literature process may well entail constant reshaping, change, and

3 Wolfgang Schamoni, “Weltliteratur – zuerst 1773 bei August Ludwig Schlözer”,

in Arcadia. Internationale Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft, vol. 43, n° 2, 2008, p. 288-
298.
4 Marko Juvan, Prešernovska struktura in svetovni literarni sistem, Ljubljana, LUD Liter-

atura, 2012, p. 82-122.

5 Marko Juvan, Prešernovska struktura in svetovni literarni sistem, op. cit., p. 115-125, 139-

152; Marko Juvan, “Worlding literatures between dialogue and hegemony”, op. cit.

92
variant inscriptions of the globalized repertoire in particular literary
fields, but it also transcends its temporal and local variation because
its semiotic sediments are kept and reproduced through the forms
and contents of the cultural memory. Cultural memories of partic-
ular literatures in various languages share representations of what
counts universal literary and human value, most notably in the guise
of an international hyper-canon. In other words, in addition to Da-
vid Damrosch’s criterion of a work of world literature, that is, its
active presence in (major) foreign literatures6, its mnemonic longue
durée and normative value in the global space are equally important.
Works of world literature need to be remembered across the globe,
what implies their long-lasting reproduction in foreign literary
fields, the globally dominant systems being necessarily among them.
Consequently, when measuring a world literary status of a particular
text in terms of its active presence abroad, one should not stop at
its occurrence in library holdings, the number of its translations to
world languages or numbers of copies printed and sold. Such an
approach to the factual existence and institutions of world litera-
ture, recently advocated by Stefan Helgesson and Pieter Ver-
meulen7, is certainly most valuable inasmuch its proponents8 undo
chimeric conceptions or prejudices concerning world literature, in-
cluding Emily Apter’s well-known “untranslatability” thesis9. What

6 David Damrosch, What Is World Literature?, Princeton, Princeton University

Press, 2003, p. 4, 15.
7 Stefan Helgesson & Pieter Vermeulen, “Introduction: World Literature in the

Making”, in Institutions of World Literature: Writing, Translation, Markets, eds. Stefan

Helgesson & Pieter Vermeulen, New York, Routledge, 2016, p. 1-20.
8 E.g., Sarah Brouillette, “World Literature and Market Dynamics”, in Institutions of

World Literature: Writing, Translation, Markets, op. cit., p. 93-106; Pieter Vermeulen,
“On World Literary Reading: Literature, the Market, and the Antinomies of Mo-
bility”, in Institutions of World Literature: Writing, Translation, Markets, op. cit., p. 79-92;
Gisèle Sapiro, “Comparativism, Transfers, Entangled History: Sociological Per-
spectives on Literature”, in A Companion to Comparative Literature, eds. Ali Behdad
& Dominic Thomas, Chichester, Wiley-Blackwell, 2011, p. 225-236; Gisèle Sapiro,
“Strategies of Importation of Foreign Literature in France in the Twentieth Cen-
tury: The Case of Gallimard, or the Making of an International Publisher”, in In-
stitutions of World Literature: Writing, Translation, Markets, op. cit., p. 143-159.
9 Emily Apter, Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability, Lon-

don/New York, Verso, 2013.

93
is also essential to study, however, is a prolonged timeline of data
such as the work’s successive editions over several decades, inclu-
sions in a series of anthologies, its continuous status of a reference
or object of study in the humanities, and last not least a firm posi-
tion in schools and curricula. Along with re-writing, re-translating,
staging, film or TV adaptation, and other practices of intertextual
referencing (including catchphrases and stereotyped allusions, such
as To be or not to be, Faustian longing), these data testify to how deep
the work in question has been engraved in the cultural memory of
a particular linguistic, ethnic, or territorial community.
As a process of cross-linguistic circulation and a hyper-canonic
structure of cultural memory, world literature establishes the nor-
mative horizon on which actors of a given literary field perceive
their particular standing in relation to the presumed universality of
the literary. World literature imagined this way represents to indi-
vidual literatures (primarily to those that are emergent, dependent,
minor, or peripheral) the Promised Land of their potential univer-
sality. It is the gateway and goal of their worlding10. At the same
time, the locally specific variant of the world literature repertoire
enmeshed in the cultural memory and literary practices of a given
literature evokes metonymically the historical totality of the global
time-space continuum. As Eric Hayot would say: “While the work
is, in the Heideggerian sense, a world, it also shows a world, just as
the world itself shows a world. Both work and world show both
world and its worlding”11. Domesticated through translation, adap-
tation, scholarly comment, and teaching, the limited selection of
fragments of world literature actively present and remembered in
the individual literature forms an aesthetically consumable mosaic
representing the incommensurability of the global spatiotemporal
otherness. Although every literary field and language have estab-
lished their proper variant of world literature, the plurality of world
literature’s repertoires in various cultures is always already overde-
termined by western bourgeois geo-culture that has been irresistibly
globalized since the nineteenth century.

10Marko Juvan, “Worlding literatures between dialogue and hegemony”, op. cit.
11Eric Hayot, On Literary Worlds, Oxford/New York, Oxford University Press,
2012, p. 25.

94
 What is world literature, after all? An unequivocal answer still
has not been found, although the question was first raised by Dio-
nýz Ďurišin (1992) and later David Damrosch (2003)12. From ca-
nonical writings of the contemporary troika of world literature stud-
ies (Casanova, Moretti and Damrosch13), one may distil a provi-
sional definition. According to the definition, world literature is a
system that, by establishing interaction between particular literary
fields and through translation, creates channels for the cross-na-
tional circulation of literary works, the reception and cultural impact
of which become anchored relatively permanently within a multi-
tude of foreign literary fields outside their local environment. A lit-
erary work entering world literature must find its place in the great
foreign literature belonging to an internationally influential country,
which, consequently, is the homeland of a world language. From
the definition above it follows that world literature is structured un-
equally, through relationships of mutual dependence. The interna-
tional distribution of each work is dependent on the media and on
selection within globally influential countries, as well as on transla-
tions into world languages.
As known, the translation is the main channel for the global cir-
culation of literary texts14. It enables particular literatures access to
the world space, thus shaping their “images”15 both in the current
reception and in the social memory that reproduces the world liter-
ary canon. Since the production of translations is a subsystem of
national literatures and world literature, it is itself determined by the

12 Dionýz Ďurišin, Čo je svetová literatúra, Bratislava, Obzor, 1992; David Damrosch,

op. cit.
13 Pascale Casanova, La République mondiale des Lettres, Paris, Seuil, 1999; Franco

Moretti, “Conjectures on World Literature”, in New Left Review, 1, 2000, p. 54-68;

Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History, Lon-
don/New York, Verso, 2005; David Damrosch, op. cit.
14 Dionýz Ďurišin, op. cit., p. 184-185; David Damrosch, op. cit., p. 281-300;

Ástrádur Eysteinsson, “Notes on World Literature and Translation”, in Angles on

the English-Speaking World. Vol. 6: Literary Translation: World Literature or ‘Worlding’
Literature, ed. Ida Klitgård, Copenhagen, Museum Tusculanum Press, University
of Copenhagen, 2006, p. 11-24; Stefan Helgesson & Pieter Vermeulen, “Introduc-
tion: World Literature in the Making”, op. cit., p. 9.
15 André Lefevere, Translation, Rewriting, and the Manipulation of Literary Fame, Lon-

don, Routledge, 1992, p. 5-9.

95
asymmetry in the distribution of cultural capital, as pointed out in
relation to world literature by Franco Moretti and Pascale Casa-
nova16. As Johan Heilbron explains, translation activity, too, knows
centers and peripheries17: while centers are predominantly export-
oriented (more texts around the world are translated out of the cen-
tral languages than out of peripheral languages), peripheries are pre-
dominantly import-oriented. In fact, it is in the translation system
that the intertwining of the political-economic and linguistic-cul-
tural factors of literary dependency is the most obvious18. What is
translated, as well as how and for what purpose it is translated, de-
pends on the publishing industry as an economic activity, while the
strength of the publishing industry is commensurate with the level
of economic development and political influence of its environ-
ment. Gisèle Sapiro has recently provided an excellent case study
of the Parisian publisher Gallimard. With its geopolitically moti-
vated strategies of broadening the number of languages and coun-
tries represented in its translation repertoire, Gallimard acquired a
great “consecrating power […] on an international scale”. Many
foreign authors Gallimard published in French with introductions
by renowned French writers and intellectuals won worldwide
recognition through further translations and important literary
awards, such as the Nobel Prize, whereas the publisher was able to
(economically) capitalize the symbolic capital of authors it helped
to promote as international classics19.
Being a form of linguistic practice, literature is, of course, de-
pendent on the relations between the languages of the world. Lan-
guages with hundreds of millions of speakers have less difficulty
becoming established in the world than minor languages. More than
by the number of native speakers, however, the international

16 Franco Moretti, “Conjectures on World Literature”, op. cit.; Pascale Casanova,

op. cit.
17 Johan Heilbron, “Towards a Sociology of Translation”, in Critical Readings in

Translation Studies, ed. Mona Baker, London, Routledge, 2010, p. 306-314.

18 Cf. Pascale Casanova, “Consecration and Accumulation of Literary Capital”, in

Critical Readings in Translation Studies, op. cit., p. 288.

19 Gisèle Sapiro, “Strategies of Importation of Foreign Literature in France in the

Twentieth Century: The Case of Gallimard, or the Making of an International Pub-

lisher”, op. cit.

96
position of an individual literature is determined by how many mul-
tilingual speakers master its language20. The languages mastered by
the most multilingual speakers are world languages. Their dominant
position is also decisively linked to the economic and political
power of the countries in which these languages have been stand-
ardized: world languages are heirs to the early modern empires. The
connection between a country’s position in the global economy and
the global position of its culture is established by the activity of the
international publishing market. Eugene Eoyang measures imbal-
ance in the international trade in translations with a “Translation
Index”, i.e., the ratio between translation imports and exports. Lit-
eratures that more frequently translate out of than are translated into
foreign languages are dependent, whereas literatures with the op-
posite export-import ratio are hegemonic21.
Inevitably, the recognition of inequalities within the world liter-
ary and translation systems has caused anxieties. I would venture to
claim that the center/periphery opposition has drawn criticism
mainly from the intellectual standpoint attempting to think and
speak for the periphery. To be more precise, the harshest have been
the critics affiliated to prominent academic locations who figured
as spokespersons of peripheral others. These scholars have sug-
gested pursuing literary studies within the post-national paradigm
in a manner different from the one adapting Goethe’s Weltliteratur
to the heyday of globalization and its post 9/11 crisis. Adherents of
post-colonialism and literary transnationalism blamed Casanova’s
and Moretti’s materialist opposition between centers and peripher-
ies for territorializing relationships between literatures and reducing
them to the cultural market and diffusionism. As an unbearable
consequence of the center/periphery dichotomy, authors in de-
pendent milieus would be destined to a belated imitation and be-
reaved of authenticity. In the opinion of post-colonial critics, the
concept of the world literary system proposed by Moretti and Cas-
anova thus only reproduces the outdated Euro-centrism of

20 Pascale Casanova, “Consecration and Accumulation of Literary Capital”, op. cit.,

p. 289-290; Johan Heilbron, “Towards a Sociology of Translation”, op. cit., p. 306.
21 Eugene Chen Eoyang, “Borrowed Plumage”: Polemical Essays on Translation, Amster-

dam, Rodopi, 2003, p. 17-26.

97
traditional comparative literature22. Proclaiming an utopian idea of
“planetarity” and urging for a close philological interpretation of
“texture”, Gayatri Spivak also rejects Moretti’s “distant reading” to-
gether with his application of Wallerstein’s economic world-system,
on the assumption that they miss the complexity of inter-literary
contacts, especially on the global South23. Finally, Jean Bessière and
Tumba Alfred Shango Lokoho24, supporters of the liberal concept
of littérature-monde, stand for those who believe that global mobility
of capital and population, as well as the capacities of digital com-
munication, render the very notion of the center meaningless.
Franco Moretti’s materialist concept of a one but unequal world
literary system has been rebutted by critics who refuse to come to
terms with the dependent position ascribed by the systemic concept
to the community in whose name they speak. On the other hand,
his concept is opposed by the metropolitan academic elite, who,
due to their liberal textualism and humanism, cannot accept the sys-
temic concept itself and its geopolitical stratification of symbolic
impact. Critical voices were raised even against the cosmopolitan,
aesthetic, and humanistic notion of world literature as represented
by Damrosch’s dialogic concept of reading as an “elliptical refrac-
tion” between linguistic and culturally heterogeneous literatures of
the world25. Damrosch’s explanation of the experience of a foreign
text, in which the aesthetic mode of reading anesthetizes the polit-
ical and cultural otherness to fashion a medium for the reader’s self-
reflection, appears to export Western aesthetic discourse as a

22 Pier Paolo Frassinelli & David Watson, “World Literature: A Receding Hori-

zon”, in Traversing Transnationalism: The Horizons of Literary and Cultural Studies, eds.
Pier Paolo Frassinelli, Ronit Frenkel & David Watson, Amsterdam, Rodopi, 2011,
p. 197-204.
23 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Death of a Discipline, New York, Columbia Univer-

sity Press, 2003, p. 108. Cf. Jonathan Arac, “Anglo-globalism?”, in New Left Review,
16, 2002, p. 38.
24 Jean Bessière, “Centre et périphérie : Points de vue littéraires. Quelques nota-

tions en guise de préface”, in Histoire de la littérature et jeux d’échange entre centres et

périphéries. Les identités relatives des littératures, eds. Jean Bessière & Judit Maár, Paris,
L’Harmattan, 2010, p. 7-12; Tumba Alfred Shango Lokoho, “Édouard Glissant et
la problématique du centre”, in Histoire de la littérature et jeux d’échange entre centres et
périphéries. Les identités relatives des littératures, op. cit., p. 151-168.
25 David Damrosch, op. cit., p. 15, 283-300.

98
universal model of literariness. Through world literature, the radi-
cally different social modalities of linguistic practices of the third
world are compelled to adapt to the Western notion of literary art
and what Arjun Appadurai calls “Eurochronology” 26. Moreover,
according to Emily Apter, the translated world literature canon, alt-
hough intended to expand horizons of Western students, effaces
the singularity and linguo-cultural situatedness of the original texts
by turning them into fragmented items of the aesthetic museum27.
The international publishing, the producer of contemporary global
literature in translation as well as world literature anthologies, only
adds to the tendency to wipe out vernacular particularity in order
to achieve general understanding. In Pieter Vermeulen’s words, it is
also able “to convert singularities into marketable differences, and
to design niche markets for experiences that may initially seem too
insignificant to count”28.
To sum up, the concept of world literature haunts critics due to
its Western-centrism. In its materialist-systemic interpretation and
the center/periphery tension, world literature is said to reinforce
the cultural model of modernity with which Western capitalism has
conquered other parts of the planet. Nonetheless, world literature
as interpreted from the perspective of liberal cosmopolitanism
causes no less anxiety. It is accused of reproducing Western-cen-
trism by privileging global English as the language of translation,
globalizing the aesthetic mode of reading, and imposing the Euro-
chronology to the study of global literary history. Various trends
have arisen as an alternative to the center/periphery model of world
literature, ranging from the substitution of the concept of world
literature with other notions (such as transnationalism, cosmopoli-
tanism, post-colonialism, Francophonie, etc.), through the

26 Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, Minne-

apolis/London, University of Minnesota Press, 2000, p. 30. Cf. Christopher Pren-
dergast, “The World Republic of Letters”, in Debating World Literature, ed. Christo-
pher Prendergast, London/New York, Verso, 2004, p. 6; Emily Apter, op. cit.,
p. 57-69.
27 Emily Apter, op. cit., p. 320-329.
28 Pieter Vermeulen, “On World Literary Reading: Literature, the Market, and the

Antinomies of Mobility”, op. cit., p. 80. Cf. Emily Apter, The Translation Zone,
Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2006, p. 97-99.

99
pluralization and decentralization of world literature, to an affirma-
tion of the periphery.
Pluralism claims that there is no single world literature because
it is always already perspectivized29. With their translation reper-
toires and canons, the various national literatures reproduce differ-
ent versions of world literature. Perspectivism assigns world litera-
ture a plurality not only as a phenomenon but also as an idea. In
fact, the universality of the idea of world literature is intrinsically
marked with the particular loci in which it has taken shape. As men-
tioned above, Goethe originally launched the notion of Weltliteratur
into the European cosmopolitan community because he felt that
the coming era of world literature, with its growing intercultural ex-
change on the European market, might help German literature ob-
tain a more central position in the international relations. As I have
pointed out elsewhere, there have been many other instances of
stressing a particular perspective on world literature, such as Rich-
ard G. Moulton’s 1911 opinion that the essentials of Hellenic and
Hebraic civilizations (which he regarded as fundaments of Anglo-
American culture) implied an “English point of view” on world lit-
erature. Similarly, Richard Meyer provided his contemporaneous
1913 book on the twentieth-century world literature with the sub-
title “from a German perspective”30. Today, John Pizer also em-
phasizes that world literature “presupposes a specific national per-
spective” and thus “conjures inevitably different visions, and will
inspire quite different canons, in China, France, England, and Ja-
pan”31.
Arguing that concepts of world literature themselves are “geo-
politically or ‘semiospherically’ conditioned”, Ilya Kliger suggests
that the theory of the world literary system – with its focus on West-
ern cultural industries – results simply from Moretti’s academic

29 Marko Juvan, Literary Studies in Reconstruction: An Introduction to Literature, Frank-

furt, Peter Lang, 2011, p. 85-86; Marko Juvan, Prešernovska struktura in svetovni liter-
arni sistem, op. cit., p. 213-222.
30 Marko Juvan, “Introduction to World Literatures from the Nineteenth to the

Twenty-first Century”, in CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, vol. 15, n° 5,

December 2013, http://dx.doi.org/10.7771/1481-4374.2333.
31 John Pizer, The Idea of World Literature: History and Pedagogical Practice, Baton

Rouge, Louisiana University Press, 2006, p. 89-90.

100
placement in the United States32. As an alternative, Kliger draws
attention to “a second-world, or (semi-)peripheral, view of world
literature”33 such as Yuri Lotman’s semiotics, which focuses on the
proclivity of the periphery for innovation. Dionýz Ďurišin, a pio-
neer of the theory of world literature, is another example of a view
from the second-world margins. Unlike Casanova or Moretti,
Ďurišin does not confine interliterary relations to inter-national or
economic struggle, foregrounding instead complementarity within
the interliterary communities of Central Europe, Slavic nations, the
Mediterranean, or the former Yugoslavia34. Instead of lamenting
lagging behind the center, he stresses the irregular and accelerated
development of minor literatures35. In place of influence, he pro-
poses a dialogic notion of creative reception of metropolitan pat-
terns36.
However, due to the “traveling concepts”37 and the cosmopoli-
tan claim endemic to theory, the place of uttering cannot per se de-
termine one’s theorizing. For example, although identified with a
perspective on world literature from the global center, Moretti’s
world-system theory does not only draw on the US-American the-
orist Immanuel Wallerstein. Equally important to him is Itamar
Even-Zohar’s polysystem theory, which, placed in Tel Aviv, seems
to be no less geopolitically peripheral than Ďurišin’s Slovak school
of comparatistics. Moreover, two important non-Western prede-
cessors – Russian Formalism and (Prague) structuralism – inspired
the way Even-Zohar affirms the role of the periphery in the literary
process. Even-Zohar admits that at the time of their emergence,
peripheral literatures rely heavily on the already established centers,
thus building their repertoire and an institutional basis. In so doing,
however, they do not act as passive recipients because their

32 Ilya Kliger, “World Literature Beyond Hegemony in Yuri M. Lotman’s Cultural

Semiotics”, in Comparative Critical Studies, vol. 7, n° 2-3, 2010, p. 259-263.

33 Ibid., p. 259.
34 Dionýz Ďurišin, op. cit., p. 160-172.
35 Ibid., p. 179-183.
36 Ibid., p. 93-95.
37 Mieke Bal, Traveling Concepts in the Humanities: A Rough Guide, Toronto, University

of Toronto Press, 2002.

101
relationship to interference from the center is strategic and respon-
sive38.
Still, by emphasizing the acts of selection and transformation of
the literary import, the dependence of peripheries becomes even
more evident. A peripheral literature does choose foreign elements
according to its needs but its choices are not free. The attractive,
fashionable, and well-selling supplies on the international book
market condition a peripheral demand for metropolitan products.
Using the cross-national cultural trade, centers disseminate new
patterns that trigger consumerist desire worldwide. As a result, met-
ropolitan literary structures become an object of peripheral imita-
tion. In the nineteenth century, for example, the demand for do-
mestic novels “in the manner of Scott” spread in Europe, while
some thirty years ago, the imported brand of metafiction helped
second-world writers, longing for the Western postmodern, to be-
come visible to the cultured audience of their countries39. In his
typology of “(inter)literary dependency”, Andrei Terian would class
the examples listed above as belonging to what he terms “mimetic
literatures”. The term denotes a category of peripheral literatures
that “replicate literatures written in countries on which they do not
depend in any way, politically or linguistically”; their voluntary
mimetism, different from the imposed mimicry of (post)colonial
literatures, “often acts as a catalyst that stimulates the construction
of an ethnocultural identity”40.
Stating the preponderance of diffusionist unidirectionality
threatens to undermine the self-esteem of weaker literatures, even
though Moretti – somehow anticipating frustrations triggered by
his model of literary inequality – hastens to admit that it is margins
that, being in the majority, actually instantiate the rules of literary
evolution, and not centers: “The ‘typical’ rise of the novel is

38 Itamar Even-Zohar, “Polysystem Studies”, in Poetics Today, vol. 11, n° 1, 1990,

p. 24-25, 48, 53-72.

39 Cf. Monica Spiridon, “Kronika napovedane smrti: postmodernizem”, in Primer-

jalna književnost, vol. 28, n° 1, 2005, p. 1-13.

40 Andrei Terian, “Is There an East-Central European Postcolonialism? Towards

a Unified Theory of (Inter)Literary Dependency”, in World Literature Studies, vol. 4,

n° 3, 2012, p. 28.

102
Krasicki, Kemal, Rizal, Maran – not Defoe”41. Moreover, Moretti
does not deny peripheries innovation, for which he is wrongfully
reproached:
Cultures from the center have more resources to pour into innovation
(literary and otherwise), and are thus more likely to produce it: but a mo-
nopoly over creation is a theological attribute, not an historical judgment.
[…]. The fact that innovations may arise in the semi-periphery, but then
be captured and diffused by the core of the core, emerges from several
studies on the early history of the novel […], which have pointed out how
often the culture industry of London and Paris discovers a foreign form,
introduces a few improvements, and then retails it as its own throughout
Europe42.

Such observations allow for a revaluation of peripheries that

might do away with the trauma of delayed imitation. Inspired by
Yuri Tynyanov’s and Mikhail Bakhtin’s respective affirmations of
the evolutionary value of marginal, uncanonical, or subcultural gen-
res (such as the parody), Itamar Even-Zohar is among those who
argue that the central, representative and dominant zones of a par-
ticular literary polysystem would petrify without their tensions with
and regenerating influx from non-canonized, marginalized, or sub-
cultural repertoires 43 . Likewise, Yuri Lotman’s semiotics empha-
sizes that the periphery, because of its tension with the center, pro-
duces “an excess of information” and a “perpetual reservoir of se-
miotic dynamism”44. The relationship between central and periph-
eral discourses within individual literary systems finds its equivalent
at the level of contacts between literatures. Dominant literatures are
able to reproduce and evolve not only due to their internal center-
periphery dynamics but also because of the influence from periph-
eral cultural systems. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries bear
witness to this fact by the international success of Nordic ballads,
Icelandic sagas, South Slavic folk songs, Ibsenian dramas, Japanese
haiku, Latin American magic realism, and African and Caribbean
literature.

41 Franco Moretti, “Conjectures on World Literature”, op. cit., p. 61.

42 Franco Moretti, “More Conjectures”, in New Left Review, 20, 2003, p. 76, 78.
43 Itamar Even-Zohar, op. cit., p. 14-17.
44 Ilya Kliger, op. cit., p. 266.

103
 However, Casanova, Gisèle Sapiro, Sarah Brouillette, and Stefan
Helgesson and Pieter Vermeulen all stress that the global impact of
a particular work depends on the consecration procedure that takes
place in metropolises45. It involves metropolitan cultural elites (rec-
ognized translators, critics, editors, and writers of prefaces), strate-
gies of major publishers on the international literary market, topical
issues of public discourse, as well as on internationally renowned
literary prizes. Cosmopolitan networking of peripheral writers, their
mobility, and taking positions near the global centers of decision-
making further increase their opportunities for an international
breakthrough. On this basis, a metropolis may recognize the formal
innovation of a peripheral work, insofar as the latter is considered
au courant with metropolitan perceptions of modernity; the work,
however, is expected to remain saturated with cultural otherness
and traces of the historic particularities of its original locus46. A text
imported from the periphery becomes attractive provided it oscil-
lates between synchronization with the arts of the center and its
proper alterity so that the center is unable to translate it fully into
its own categories. Moreover, metropolises have secured their cul-
tural privilege due to the economic and colonial exploitation of the
periphery. Parallel to Western museums, their influential repertoires
have been renovated by the appropriation of the cultural heritages
of the third-world cultures47, by attracting outstanding authors from
“exotic” milieus, as well as by the assimilation of distant poetics. In
the metropolises, these have often been made to evoke otherness
anonymously, without being reimbursed for refreshing the aesthetic
pleasures of the West with the authorial function in the world
canon. Thus, the imparity within the world literary system

45 Pascale Casanova, La République mondiale des Lettres, op. cit., p. 343, passim; Gisèle
Sapiro, “Strategies of Importation of Foreign Literature in France in the Twentieth
Century: The Case of Gallimard, or the Making of an International Publisher”, op.
cit.; Sarah Brouillette, op. cit.; Stefan Helgesson & Pieter Vermeulen, “Introduction:
World Literature in the Making”, op. cit.
46 Cf. Pascale Casanova, op. cit., p. 127-138; Mads Rosendahl Thomsen, Mapping

World Literature: International Canonization and Transnational Literatures, New York,

Continuum, 2008, p. 48.
47 Emily Apter, Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability, op. cit.,

p. 325.

104
corresponds to the division Vladimir Biti observes in cosmopoli-
tanism between the “agencies […] entitled to conduct the dialogue of
equals, and the non-political enablers, excluded from this dialogue in
order to procure its prerequisites”48.
Galin Tihanov’s recent observation is a case in point. Writing
on the existence of minor literatures, Tihanov points out that pe-
ripheral Slavic literatures such as Bulgarian first attracted the atten-
tion of the western center in the context of the post-enlightenment
“anthropological curiosity” for folklore – that is, a per definitionem
anonymous, unauthored creativity of a collective body. In Tihanov
words, this interest for peripheries “was lifting entire ethnic com-
munities from the obscurity of mere exoticism to that of benign
cultural insignificance within the emerging framework of shared
European values” 49 . Consequently, deemed universally insignifi-
cant, Bulgarian culture entered Europe with the translation of its
specific folklore to provide further interesting details to a post-
Herderian cosmopolitan gaze. Tihanov underlines that translating a
peripheral folklore in the West represents “an asynchronic adop-
tion, where cultural forms long gone are domesticated once again
as a manifestation of anonymous (and thus already softened) exot-
icism; folklore reveals a previous archaic stage of cultural evolution
that cannot be sustained, or indeed, recommended any longer in
the West”50.
In addition to the affirmation of the periphery, the opposition
to Eurocentric diffusionism resulted in highlighting interliterary
contacts between the peripheries. According to Pier Paolo Frassi-
nelli and David Watson, literary traffic between the regions sur-
rounding the Indian Ocean circulates not only through the global
centers but also through direct exchanges between the margins51.
Granted, it is hardly possible to deny that the waves emanating from

48 Vladimir Biti, Tracing Global Democracy: Literature, Theory, and the Politics of Trauma,

Berlin/Boston, De Gruyter, 2016, p. 1, passim.

49 Galin Tihanov, “Do ‘Minor Literatures’ Still Exist? The Fortunes of a Concept

in the Changing Frameworks of Literary History”, in Reexamining the National-Phil-

ological Legacy: Quest for a New Paradigm?, ed. Vladimir Biti, Amsterdam, Rodopi,
2014, p. 173.
50 Ibid.
51 Pier Paolo Frassinelli & David Watson, op. cit., p. 206.

105
the centers shape the global physiognomy of literature, but regional
cultural watersheds and a capillary osmosis between neighboring
semiospheres play a no less important role in the structuring of the
world literary system. A nineteenth-century episode I have dis-
cussed elsewhere52 may serve as a case in point. In the context of
the 1833 language and political controversy called the “Slovenian
Alphabet War,” the literary historian and philologist Matija Čop
(1797-1835) commented at length on the review of the Slovenian
poetic almanac Krajnska čbelica that a prominent Czech poet Fran-
tišek L. Čelakovský (1799-1852) had published in 1832 in the Pra-
gue journal Časopis českého Museum. Čelakovský’s sample translations
and praise of France Prešeren’s (1800-1849) poetry as an achieve-
ment that, speaking to a broad community of Slavdom, transcends
backward conditions of its home literature was used by Čop as a
foreign (i.e., international) argument supporting his Romantic and
cosmopolitan version of Slovenian cultural nationalism. The Slove-
nian-Czech romantic alliance forged by criticism and translation
was an instance of interliterariness through which, in the Austrian
Empire, three types of literary systems emerged concurrently along
with their respective centers and subcenters (Vienna, Prague, and
Ljubljana). In addition to the nascent modern national literatures
and the coming epoch of world literature, a regional literary circuit
among literatures in Slavic languages came into being. Regional in-
terliterary relations of the kind established what Ďurišin’s school of
comparative literature terms interliterary communities and cen-
trisms. Ideologically based solidarity among literatures related by
linguistic kinship and common rulers served political needs – mu-
tual support of stateless nations in their individual strivings for
recognition and autonomy within the Habsburg Empire53.
Furthermore, the sources of international currents are not ex-
clusive to established metropolises. The “temporary subcenters”
that Mads Rosendahl Thomsen writes about54 are less influential in

52 Marko Juvan, “In the Background of the ‘Alphabet War’: Slovenian-Czech In-

terliterary Relations and World Literature”, in Taming World Literature, eds. Liina
Lukas & Katre Talviste, Tartu, University of Tartu Press, 2015, p. 148-158.
53 Cf. Galin Tihanov, op. cit., p. 175-176.
54 Mads Rosendahl Thomsen, op. cit., p. 33-60.

106
terms of authors, and emanate influence into their proximity for
shorter spans of time than do large metropolises; nonetheless, they
may be temporarily more important. Thus, from 1860 to 1880, a
European echo was aroused by Russia’s Turgenev, Tolstoy, and
Dostoevsky; between 1880 and 1900, by Scandinavia’s Ibsen,
Strindberg, Hamsun, Jacobsen, and Brandes; while, at the turn of
the twentieth century, this role was taken by Viennese Modern-
ism55.
In their verbal commitment to the symbolic elimination of
global literary inequality, the approaches I have listed so far remind
of Freudian denial (Verleugnung). Multicultural humanism, textual-
ism, and liberal cosmopolitanism adopt the deceptive view that
texts move freely, and that they can be attributed global importance
irrespective of their origin, the pressures of the economic and po-
litical system, and the mechanisms of the international publishing
industry. As a system that has evolved from the end of the eight-
eenth century until the present day, world literature is a pertinent
analytical category. In my opinion, it should be accepted, as it helps
us to understand the very economic, political and linguistic-cultural
overdetermination of global interliterary exchange. The asymme-
tries of the global literary circuit are structurally (but not geograph-
ically) analogous to the economic division of the central, semi-pe-
ripheral, and peripheral countries of world capitalism. The role of
an intermediary between the global economic and literary systems
goes to the international book market and the world system of
translation, which are overdetermined by the geopolitical status and
historic prestige of world languages. The relationship between cen-
ter and periphery is both reversible and transitive: every center was
once a periphery, a periphery constitutes a center as much as the
opposite is true, a center can change to a periphery and vice versa,
a periphery may become a (sub)center.
In his seminal paper “Do ‘Minor Literatures’ Still Exist?”, Galin
Tihanov gives more historical precision to the center/periphery op-
position that Moretti and Casanova themselves already treat histor-
ically – that is, as pertaining to the modern world literary system or

55 Ibid., p. 34-39.

107
space that began to evolve in the eighteenth century together with
the international book market. Moretti:
The term “world literature” has been around for almost two centuries, but
we still do not know what world literature is… Perhaps, because we keep
collapsing under a single term two distinct world literatures: one that precedes
the eighteenth century – and one that follows it. The “first” Weltliteratur is
a mosaic of separate, “local” cultures […]. The “second” Weltliteratur
(which I would prefer to call world literary system) is unified by the inter-
national literary market56.

Although Moretti underestimates regional coherence of literary

circulation in pre-modern and early modern world systems, his dis-
tinction between two historical types of world literature is pertinent.
What Tihanov adds to the notion of peripheral or minor literatures
within the modern world literary system (whose infrastructure is an
international literary market), is his observation that peripherality
comes into existence (in Europe) only as a byproduct of Western
modernity:
The true history of “minor literatures”, in the sense of small and poor
relatives of the mainstream European literatures commences only with the
end of the “exotic phase” and the arrival of the more or less synchronized
literary movements of the fin-du-siècle and later the avant-garde, the many
isms (Symbolism being one of the most recognizable such phenomena)
which begin to coordinate the map of literary Europe and entangle the
smaller literatures of the Balkans and of East-Central Europe into a larger
landscape of shared conventions and styles57.

Let me conclude my paper with a short case study on an inno-

vative author from the periphery and his difficult and lingering
posthumous way toward consecrating centers of world literature.
The author under consideration perfectly fits the pattern Tihanov
describes as pertaining to the period in which minor literatures of
the East-Central Europe synchronized with Western modernist
isms. In his short life, the Slovenian modernist poet Srečko Kosovel
(1904-1926) did not witness any published collection of his poems,
56 Franco Moretti, “Evolution, World-Systems, Weltliteratur”, in Studying Transcul-
tural Literary History, ed. Gunilla Lindberg-Wada, Berlin/New York, De Gruyter,
2006, p. 120.
57 Galin Tihanov, op. cit., p. 173-174.

108
while his landmark poetic “constructions” of the 1920s remained
largely unknown until 1967 when their publication astonished Slo-
venian neo-avant-garde circles. Since Kosovel did not succeed to
segment his abundant, imbalanced, and heterogeneous oeuvre by
organizing it in a succession of collections, literary history, dazzled
by the variety of his styles and forms, ended up in an aporia regard-
ing its periodization. Kosovel almost synchronically wrote in the
styles of lyrical impressionism and symbolism, expressionist catas-
trophism, and revolutionary constructivism. Whereas his poetic
works that followed traditional conventions of the lyrical discourse
gained wide recognition after Kosovel’s death, his avant-garde con-
structions published in 1967 were a discovery that shook the image
of Kosovel as a subtle lyrical poet of the Karst region and an ethi-
cally committed expressionist seer of the downfall of the West.
Although being a young and unrecognized poet writing in a mi-
nor language of a minor literature, Kosovel was keen to address
global literary-artistic and political conflicts, attempting to synchro-
nize his essayistic and poetic work with transnational modernist
currents. He did not only respond to the troubled condition of Slo-
venian literature, whose mainstream was languid in its provincial
bourgeois complacency, while the nation, divided between the four
states (Italy, Austria, Hungary, and Yugoslavia), found itself ex-
posed to the pressures of Italian fascism in the Littoral region and
an increasingly authoritarian rule within the boundaries of the Yu-
goslav Kingdom. Kosovel’s poetry also interiorized transnational
chronotopes of the emerging crisis of global capitalism spanning
India, Russia, the Balkans, and America. In 1924, he thus boldly
proclaimed his creative work to be “mine, Slovenian, modern, Eu-
ropean and everlasting”. Kosovel and his circle frequented public
and university libraries where they closely studied the available cov-
erage of European avant-garde, particularly Balkan Zenithism, Ital-
ian futurism, Russian constructivism, German expressionism, and
transnational Dadaism. With their holdings stemming partly from
what Venkat Mani calls “bibliomigrancy” 58 , local libraries

58 Bala Venkat Mani, “Bibliomigrancy: Book Series and the Making of World Lit-

erature”, in The Routledge Companion to World Literature, eds. Theo D’haen, David
Damrosch & Djelal Kadir, London/New York, Routledge, 2012, p. 283-296.

109
functioned as the hubs of world literature and heterotopias through
which a marginal from a minor literature was able to get access to
the network of the world’s cultural spaces and actors59. As a mod-
ernist cosmopolitan from the Central European “in-between pe-
ripherality” 60 , Kosovel crossbred avant-garde styles he learned
through his reading and refurbished them in his singular texts. Us-
ing the citation fragments of contemporary politics, science, art, and
economics, Kosovel’s poetic texts mingle the local sense of place
with global scenes marked by the proximity of the October revolu-
tion, the ascendance of totalitarianism, and the crisis of the capital-
ist democratic order.
As an alternative to the bourgeois metropolises and the literary
mainstream, European avant-gardists created their own transna-
tional networks and promoted their own centers, such as Zurich,
Berlin, Petersburg, Prague, Milan, Trieste, Belgrade, and Zagreb61.
In the constellation of the European avant-gardes, the Slovenian
cultural space in the time of Kosovel had not yet boasted a center
from which Kosovel, with his original contributions, could actively
address at least the Central European or Balkan regions. Unlike
Ljubomir Micić (1895-1971), a Yugoslav Zenithist, Kosovel failed
to join any transnational avant-garde network62. He communicated
with the global modernist initiatives solely in the privacy of his mi-
nority language, in his unpublished manuscripts.
Kosovel’s poetic singularity arose in the copresence of hetero-
geneous poetics. Such irregularity is impossible to affix firmly in the
scheme of a belated following of the regular development driven by

59 Cf. Reingard Nethersole, “World Literature and the Library”, in The Routledge

Companion to World Literature, op. cit., p. 307-315.

60 Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek, “Configurations of Postcoloniality and National

Identity: Inbetween Peripherality and Narratives of Change”, in The Comparatist:

Journal of the Southern Comparative Literature Association, 23, 1999, p. 89-110.
61 Cf. Marijan Dović, “Slovenska zgodovinska avantgarda med kozmopolitizmom

in perifernostjo”, in Svetovne književnosti in obrobja, ed. Marko Juvan, Ljubljana,

Založba ZRC, 2012, p. 297-320.
62 Cf. Marijan Dović, “Anton Podbevšek, Futurism, and the Slovenian interwar

avant-garde literature”, in Futurism in Eastern and Central Europe, ed. Günter

Berghaus, Berlin, De Gruyter, 2011, p. 261-275; Marijan Dović, “Slovenska
zgodovinska avantgarda med kozmopolitizmom in perifernostjo”, op. cit., p. 306-
307, 315-317.

110
central literatures exclusively. The discourse of modernism and the
avant-gardes was polycentric and globally paratactic, with manifold
directions simultaneously intertwining and mutually permeating at
an accelerated pace63. I agree with Fredric Jameson’s critique of the
assumption that there exists “a norm for the development of
modernism and its aesthetics” or “some master evolutionary line
from which each of these national developments can be grasped as
a kind of deviation”64. He recalls Marx’s description of capitalism
according to which “there is no ‘basic’ historical paradigm, all the
paths of capitalist development are unique and unrepeatable. From
the perspective of Marxian dialectics, the very universality of
modernism, too, is enacted only through its particulars, all of them
‘specific and historically unique’”65. The coexistence and interlock-
ing of a number of stylistic directions can, therefore, be seen not
only as Kosovel’s youthful quest for a personal expression but also
as a symptom of global modernism: its hybridity.
Kosovel’s acceptance to the hyper-canon of world literature is
difficult to imagine due to Slovenia’s poor participation in the
global distribution of cultural capital, its economic semiperipheral-
ity, and meager influence in the international politics. If these fac-
tors were stronger, Slovenian writers would stand a better chance
of being catapulted into the world. Otherwise, writers from minor
literatures may win international recognition due to contingent cir-
cumstances and temporary niches on the book market, such as the
need for an authentic experience or testimony of the critical events
that occupy global media (e.g., the collapse of socialism, the wars in
the Balkans, refugee crisis, etc.). The first obstacle to Kosovel’s ac-
tive presence abroad is, of course, his native language. Spoken by
roughly 2.5 million people worldwide, the Slovenian language

63 Cf. Ástrádur Eysteinsson & Vivian Liska, “Introduction: Approaching Modern-

ism”, in Modernism. 1, eds. Ástrádur Eysteinsson & Vivian Liska, Amsterdam/Phil-

adelphia, John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2007, p. 1-3; Susan Stanford
Friedman, “Cultural Parataxis and Transnational Landscapes of Reading”, in
Modernism. 1, op. cit., p. 34-52; Susan Stanford Friedman, Planetary Modernisms: Prov-
ocations on Modernity across Time, New York, Columbia University Press, 2015.
64 Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present, Lon-

don/New York, Verso, 2002, p. 182.

65 Ibid., p. 183.

111
allows for a very limited audience, especially if we take into account
Sarah Brouillette’s remark that engaging in writing, circulating, and
reading literature on the national or global scale is an elitist activ-
ity66. The problem is that language is central to poetry and, com-
pared to prose fiction and drama, renders its translatability difficult
or even impossible. Untranslatability Emily Apter uses as an argu-
ment against world literature applies sensu stricto only to the symbolic
position of the translated authors and the connotations their texts
trigger in the audience thanks to their embeddedness in a particular
semiosphere (culture)67. No translation can reproduce a semiosis
equivalent to that of the original text in his home tradition and so-
cial context. In the same vein, Kosovel, who, from the inner per-
spective of the Slovenian literary field, represents today the pinnacle
of modern poetry, is unlikely to evoke equivalent associations in
any translation or foreign literary system.
The first French translation of Kosovel belongs to the poet
Marc Alyn and was printed in 1965 in the prestigious collection
Poètes d’aujourd’hui68. It was in Alyn’s translation (and not in the orig-
inal) that Kosovel’s most radical poetic constructions appeared in
public for the first time. A series of German translations of the se-
lections of Kosovel’s poetry by minor publishers follows from the
Munich edition of his avant-garde Integrals69, whereas English book
publications in the US and the UK start only with Wilhelm
Heiliger’s translation of 198970. However, among Kosovel’s exist-
ing book translations into major languages (8 in English, 1 in
French, 3 in Spanish, 13 in German, 27 in Italian), no major inter-
national publisher has included Kosovel in its program so far. On
the other hand, Slovenian translators, editors, promoters, and pub-
lishers have played an important role in persistent attempts to make
Kosovel known internationally. Moreover, symptomatic of the

66 Sarah Brouillette, op. cit.

67 Emily Apter, Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability, op. cit.
68 Srečko Kosovel, Kosovel: bibliographie, portraits, fac-similés, presented, selected, and

adapted by Marc Alyn, Paris, Pierre Seghers, 1965.

69 Srečko Kosovel, Integrale, selected, translated, and introduced by Wilhelm

Heiliger, Munich, Trofenik, 1976.

70 Srečko Kosovel, Integrals, selected, translated, and introduced by Wilhelm

Heiliger, San Francisco, Hungry Bear Press, 1989.

112
functioning of the global literary system is the marketing strategy
one can recognize on the cover of Kosovel’s selection The Golden
Boat71, translated by Bert Pribac and David Brooks. Here, Kosovel
features as the “Slovenian Rimbaud”. The international promotion
of a peripheral poet relies on the consecrating power of a renowned
name from the canonical constellation and on suggesting parallels
with the opus of an author from the center whose importance is
deemed epochal72. To conclude, Kosovel’s case confirms my ob-
servation that the asymmetric structure of the modern world liter-
ary system reflects the economic, political, and linguistic-cultural
overdetermination of the global interliterary exchange.

71 Srečko Kosovel, The Golden Boat: Selected Poems of Srečko Kosovel, trans. Bert Pribac

& David Brooks with the assistance of Teja Brooks Pribac, Cambridge, Salt, 2008.
72 Cf. Mads Rosendahl Thomsen, op. cit., p. 139.

113
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