Reading World Literature: Elliptical or Hyperbolic? The Case of Second-World National Literatures
Reading World Literature: Elliptical or Hyperbolic? The Case of Second-World National Literatures

Summary/Abstract: In this paper, I intend to examine the manner in which the recent reshaping of the notion of “world literature” reacts on the reading of Second-World national literatures. My first step is to attempt a definition of the concepts I intend to work with. I will begin with the term Second-World national literature, since, despite certain debatable aspects, this notion seems to be less controversial. Thus, Second-World national literature will denote any written literature in a Second-World country, in the meaning ascribed to this phrase in the classification made by the French sociologist Alfred Sauvy, more particularly with reference to the (former) communist – mainly Soviet – bloc countries (Sauvy 1952: 14). In other words, I am dealing with what is termed occasionally, in the current economic discourse, as “developing” countries, opposing both “developed” western democracies and “underdeveloped” former colonial countries. In fact, a similar approach was established, in the field of literary theory, 25 years ago, when Fredric Jameson published his famous article Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism (Jameson 1986).

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