Small/Minor Literature as World Literature. Literature as a Medium of Emancipation

The project develops a new view of world literature from the perspective of small or minor literature. Whereas minor literature has conventionally often been understood as a literature of small nations or minority languages, the project sees it as an expression of socially, culturally, or nationally oppressed or marginalized groups. This above all includes proletarian, anti-colonial, and feminist literatures which are often seen as means of emancipation.

In literary history, the connection between literature and emancipatory movements dates back a long time. However, it was only in the early 20th century that such connections were consistently incorporated into the literary self-image, thus becoming available to poetics and theory. This was due to the global emergence of emancipatory movements. The early 20th century saw the worldwide rise of different emancipatory movements, including the struggle for women’s suffrage and the equality of the sexes, the emancipatory national movements after World War I, the October Revolution, the wave of decolonization in Asia and Africa, as well as the demand for a political equality of ethnic and religious minorities. In the context of these struggles for emancipation, literature fulfilled a central role. Thus, the project explores the importance, the function, and the historical conditions of an emancipatory concept of literature and its effects on the understanding of world literature, focusing on proletarian, feminist, and anti-colonial texts.

By conceptualizing minor literature as the emancipatory literature of oppressed, marginalized, but also ostracized groups, the project aims to develop and innovative and counter-hegemonic interpretation of world literature. In this context, literature’s long—and long prematurely—discredited claim to universalism will be reevaluated.