World Literature as Palimpsest


 Has the Cold War, anchored in both the US-USSR rivalry and the rising power of China, impacted the sense and the meaning of literature as art, and our understanding of world literature? If the world literature discourse reveals a cosmopolitan feature to the cultural contestation of great power politics in the Third World and Eastern Europe, does this also mean that the Cold War discloses an irreducible agonism at the heart of world literature? This article suggests we need to answer both questions affirmatively. I approach these questions both historically and heuristically; I begin with a fictional palimpsest, composed by short excerpts from three larger texts by Peter Schneider, Boris Polevoy, and Ismail Kadare. This reading strategy aims to show that both ideological and geopolitical concerns are relevant in theorizing world literature through the lens of Cold War literature.