World War Literature: Historicizing the Debate on World Literature as a Debate on World War

‘World War Literature’ is an adapted research project funded in the framework of the Slovenian Research and Innovation Agency’s complementary scheme for project applications to the European Research Council. World literature is the topic of a debate that can itself be found worldwide in the new millennium. But even before the debate became a worldwide phenomenon some two decades ago, it had already been involved in world history for almost two centuries. World literature has been debated by public intellectuals (from J. W. von Goethe to Gayatri Spivak), Nobel laureates (from Rabindranath Tagore to Orhan Pamuk), and world revolutionaries (from Karl Marx to Maxim Gorky). In between, influential definitions of world literature have varied between all the literature of the world and the confined world of literature as a modern social field. Almost invariably, however, world literature has been discussed with a view to addressing a looming world-historical event, be it a world war, a worldwide revolution, a global recession, or a pandemic.

This tendency to evoke world history gives both a common denominator and a worldwide appeal to what might otherwise be an irreconcilable and inconsequential debate. “World War Literature” aims to unearth this tendency by examining all lasting texts that discuss world literature in the context of what historians have considered a world war, including the two World Wars but also the Cold War, the Global War on Terror, and, to a lesser extent, the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars.

Employing close reading and network theory while also probing the potential of geographic information systems and statistical hypothesis testing, the project aims to adapt tools of natural and social science for global intellectual history in order to pursue the groundbreaking discovery that debating world literature has been one way of debating and hence engaging world history. This discovery has the potential to present a major breakthrough in the theorization of world literature, with additional implications for the fields of comparative literary studies and global history.