Abstract
The article traces the evolution of Milan Kundera’s notion of world literature across his career, contextualizing his writings within major historical events, including the so-called liberalization of Czechoslovakia in the 1960s, the post-1989 transition of the former Soviet bloc, and the turn of the millennium. Throughout the years, but particularly after his own immigration to France in 1975, Kundera consistently tied the notion of world literature with that of Central Europe to emerge with a conceptual framework that enabled him to position (semi-)peripheral European literatures within the Western canon. In his influential 2005 essay “Die Weltliteratur,” Kundera ultimately reframed the marginalization of small literatures in terms reminiscent of other late twentieth-century conceptualizations of world literature, notably that of Pascale Casanova. However, the article argues that, unlike Casanova, who critically analyzed small literatures in relation to Paris, Kundera, while acknowledging their marginalization, promoted them within a framework that reproduces Eurocentric literary hierarchies, and, finally, as a novelist, embodied the very structure examined by Casanova. In this sense, Kundera became not only a thinker of world literature but also an exemplary embodiment of the mechanisms of recognition that were seminally theorized by scholars such as Casanova.
Alt Text Acknowledgement
1
Recommended Citation
Mandić, Lucija.
"Milan Kundera as a Representative and a Theorist of World Literature."
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
27.3
(2025):
<https://doi.org/10.7771/1481-4374.5295>
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