Can World Literature link Greece and Brazil? Thoughts on Literary Traffic

Abstract

Is it possible to juxtapose a Greek and a Brazilian author? What could we gain by reading them side by side? I pose these questions in order to investigate the possible openness of World Literature as a mode of literary study. While this discipline has transcended the provincialism of Comparative Literature, insofar as it embraces large areas of the globe, I argue that, like Postcolonialism, it limits itself largely to the writing of Western Europe, North America, and the former European colonies. Literary tradetions of countries like Greece, Latvia, or Georgia, which don’t fit this pattern or which were colonized by other Empires, are often ignored. I examine two modernist manifestos, written around 1922, one by the Greek critic and novelist, Yiorgos Theotokas and another by the Brazilian poet, Oswald de Andrade in order to reconsider the notion of comparison as well as the capacity of World Literature to accept irregular flows of literary traffic. I argue that both Theotokas and de Andrade strived to engage with writers outside their national borders while criticising the dominance of European literary canons. I suggest that world literature is nothing else than this interaction between nationalism and transnationalism, global and local literary productions.