The focus of this research is on two interrelated issues regarding Hugo Meltzl and Acta Comparationis Litterarum Universarum (1877-1888): first, it aims to point out that Meltzl and the origin story of comparatism that he was made to portray is central to the constitution of the discipline of World Literature, as devised by David Damrosch or Haun Saussy, some of the most influential comparatists of the past few decades. I will attempt to show that, in order to counterbalance the charge of Western-centrism, they performed a decontextualized and partial reading of Meltzl and Acta Comparationis. The second aim of the presentation, in the aftermath of other post- or de-colonial perspectives, is to historicize the discussion on Acta Comparationis in relation to new approaches to the Late Habsburg empire and in terms of the complex linguistic and identity politics embedded in the archive of the journal. The hypothesis explored here is that Acta comparationis is not a product arisen from an ineffable ideology at odds with an imperial or Eurocentric outlook, but a product embedded in the political project of the Austro-Hungarian empire. In the second part of the presentation, the practices of cultural comparison displayed in the pages of the above mentioned journal are assessed against the above mentioned environment and in relation to the manifesto(es) of polyglottism/decaglottism.

This presentation aims to discuss the testimonial literature of Romanian emigration in the 20th and 21st centuries, tracking the personal political commitments of the authors and how these commitments resonate or clash with the ideological readings they employ in their literature. Starting from the concept proposed by György Lukács in History and Class Consciousness (1923), where the Hungarian philosopher describes ‘true class consciousness’ as the awareness of the revolutionary historical role of the proletarian class, not just an awareness of one’s own social ‘status,’ the presentation investigates how the relationship between emigrant literature and social data can be described as a form of “self-reification” of the Eastern European subaltern condition and, conversely, the forms of awareness and overcoming of this reification. The main aim of this paper is to show how migration, the more it became a mass fenomenon, the more apolitical it got within literary representations. This is also due to the post-communist period, which created a tendency to explain every domestic problem through the thesis of ‘unnatural development,’ meaning that most of the social problems of Eastern Europe stem from the communist period, not from the semi-peripheral capitalism (Cornel Ban, Dependență și dezvoltare, 2014) which shaped the region. This thesis has made it difficult for writers to understand the problems of global capitalism without referring to the heavy communist legacy, and thus modified ‘class consciousness’ to fit the mainstream narrative of ‘unnatural development.’

This paper seeks to examine the diverse representations of Eastern European subjects as depicted in the works of German ethnic authors from Transylvania and Banat. These portrayals are structured around a stark dichotomy: on one side, an aspirationally “Western” segment of the population—associated with democracy and historical legitimacy—and on the other, a “Balkanized” majority, perceived as regressive and culturally backward. This division carries a distinct class dimension, engendering a form of ethnic inner diaspora. Much like other elitist migratory practices employed by Romanian writers or the phenomenon of “resistance through culture,” designating the preferred form of non-engaged dissent practiced during the communist period by Romanian intellectuals, such representations redefine class consciousness and reposition the so-called German “microliterature” (Mircea A. Diaconu 2017) within the Romanian literary landscape. As a prime example of post-communist literary export, this paper will focus on Herta Müller’s polyterritorial double diaspora. Her works navigate a dual symbolic distance: first, from her Romanian co-nationals under the Ceaușescu dictatorship, marked by her estrangement from the dominant cultural and political climate before the anti-communist revolution; and second, from her aspirational engagement with cosmopolitanism in relation to Germany, positioning her literature within a transnational framework.

Despite its efforts to leave behind the myth of creative uniqueness, most current definitions of world literature still celebrate authors as sources of exceptionalist thought and irreducible language (with the sole amendment that the modernist topos of creation ex nihilo has sometimes been replaced by the postmodern notion of cultural creolization). However, this paper aims to use the idea of serial history, widely practiced in the social sciences, to address the most conservative core of literary studies: the thesis of the canon as a repertoire of unique voices. According to the perspective shift I propose, classical questions such as “Who was the most original poet/novelist/playwright in X national literature?” transform into problems like “What transnational processes does the work of Y—recognized as a representative author in X literature—illustrate?” From this perspective, writers from various national literatures cease to be seen as sources of idiosyncratic discourses and instead become “serial authors,” nodes in different transnational networks whose value is directly proportional to their ability to associate within the broadest and most complex cultural clusters. This anti-canonical concept of world literature could be illustrated through any genre, era, or literary space, but in my paper, I have chosen to focus on literary criticism, where connections can be more clearly highlighted. Thus, in 19th-century Romanian culture, the idea that a national literature should reject the imitation of Western cultural institutions was accredited through Titu Maiorescu's so-called theory of “forms without substance”. A comparable echo can be found in the criticism of the Bulgarian intellectual Petko Slaveykov, who also warned against the dangers of imitating Western “cultural fashions.” But while the relationship between Maiorescu and Slaveykov can be explained through their belonging to a shared cultural area and the possibility of “traveling ideas,” this hypothesis becomes less viable in a transareal comparison—such as that between Maiorescu’s analysis (O cercetare critică asupra poeziei române de la 1867 [A Critical Inquiry into Romanian Poetry from 1867], 1867) and that of the Ecuadorian critic Juan León Mera (Ojeada histórico-crítica sobre la poesía ecuatoriana desde su época más remota hasta nuestros días [A Historical-Critical Overview of Ecuadorian Poetry from Its Earliest Period to the Present Day], 1868). In this case, not only do their dates of publication and ideological positions (the rejection of foreign imitation) coincide, but even the phrasing of their titles appears strikingly similar. In any case, by continuously and extensively addressing the problem of cultural imports within their respective national cultures, the writings of Maiorescu, Slaveykov, and Mera acquire a transnational significance.