engleski

World Literature as the Encyclopedia of the Dead

I propose to mobilize different concepts of world literature against the theories of modernity to which literature and the world, in equal measure, define the intellectual and the political horizon of modernity (Walter Benjamin ; Carl Schmitt). World literature, I argue, while testifying to the project of modernity, turns out to be processing, into a concept, the relationship of literature and the world that needs to remain metonymic if modernity is to be understood. Danilo Kiš's The Encyclopedia of the Dead (1983) exemplifies this proposition. It is a collection of stories that engages East-Central Europe, especially Austria-Hungary, as a synecdoche of the world whose peculiar narrative constitution reciprocates the rationale of modernity. Whatever aspires to world literature in or about this collection, however, seems confined to the conceptual demands of its title: to knowledge imagined in terms of an encyclopedia, and to the leak in this knowledge occasioned by the elision of death for the dead. While the dead in place of death is how Kiš still retains the relational imperative of literature even as it aspires to world literature, encyclopedia suggests that literature in modernity is always also betrayed for a conceptual apparatus other than itself, and that the intellectual situation of modernity is betrayed with it. Moreover, Kiš suggests that this betrayal may be integral to modernity—that modernity, as well as world literature, may be accessible to theory and philosophy only as a structure of betrayal.

world literature ; modernity ; Danilo Kiš

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