This paper discusses the problem of how short-range literatures function within the system of world literature. The aim of the text is to show that too optimistic assumptions about the dynamics of world literature circulation and failure to recognise strong competition within this system may translate into further marginalisation of shortrange literatures and/or too much globalisation of literature.

From the point of view of the world literature studies music—as the most “abstract” art—turns out to be also in this respect very different from literature, which is strongly connected with the locality. The article discusses the universalising potency of musical themes and motives in literature.

This paper deals with the issue of “utopianism” in L.M. Montgomery’s novel Anne of Green Gables (1908), a book which has been translated into Polish many times and has been shaping the worldview and mentality of Polish female readers for over a century. This utopianism is here presented in three separate approaches. Firstly, the study investigates the “translatological utopianism” of the first translation of the novel (by R. Bernstein, published in 1911), which, as a result of the linguistic and stylistic decisions of the translator, has been significantly naturalised and domesticised, as well as adapted to the multiple (genological, social, and cultural) expectations and conceptions of the Polish implied audience. Secondly, attention was drawn to the fact that Avonlea as presented in the novel is a kind of social “matriarchal utopia”, emphasising the issues of women’s solidarity, responsibility, and education, at the same time strongly referring to the Arcadian trend in utopian literature. Thirdly, it was suggested that in Moira Walley-Beckett’s film adaptation Anne of Green Gables (Anne with an E, 2017-2018), the reading “between the lines” of Montgomery’s novel and the application of the hermeneutics of suspicion by the screenwriter made the idyllic utopia of the original resemble a dystopia. 

The article is an attempt to answer the question whether Lithuanian modernist literature of the first decade of the twentieth century falls within the category of national literature, and if so, what model of such defined literature it represents or shapes. In accordance with the assumption that this category takes on meaning only in the context of the place and time in which it is invoked, the understanding of the tasks of literature characteristic of Lithuanian modernists is reconstructed here in comparison with the concepts of literature dominating in the Lithuanian intellectual life of that period.  The search for an answer to this question is also a pretext for reflection on the role of modernism in the history of Lithuanian culture and the process of the formation of Lithuanian modernity. The subject of analysis in this search is the first Lithuanian literary almanac Gabija, published in Cracow in 1907, and above all the texts of its editor, bilingual writer Józef Albin Herbaczewski. 

The interest in minor literatures—as described by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari on the basis of an analysis of Franz Kafka’s works—occupy a special place in contemporary literary life. Minority, expressed in different ways, is not only limited to political and social relations between a representative of a minority and the dominant culture, but also translates into a wide ontological field, responsible for the development of a different cognitive apparatus and numerous modifications of the existing cultural norms, including, above all, the official language.

A special manifestation of the minoritarity is the output of Horst Bienek—a German-speaking Silesian, who repeatedly refers to the category of minoritarity. This study focuses on the issue of language in the novel The First Polka, which opens his so-called Gliwice tetralogy. The way in which the writer refers to the dominant language and sound layer is in many respects consistent with the schizoanalytical interpretation, which gave birth to this understanding of minoritarity in literary texts. 

The paper concerns the question of the status and role of the landscape in relation to the experience of migration and displacement in the post-war poetry of Avrom Sutzkever. The author investigates what is characteristic about the relationship between different landscapes and migrant subject. In the poetry of Sutzkever, the landscape is intertwined with the process of reconceptualisation of the identity of the Holocaust survivor and immigrant to the land of Israel, as well as with the cultural-literary project of the integration of East European heritage and new Israeli reality. 

The present paper proposes a textual analysis of Clarice Lispector’s short story titled The Fifth Story (A quinta história). The short narrative was published in 1964 in the collection The Foreign Legion (A legião estrangeira) and is an example of Lispector’s intense fascination with the creative process. In addition, the story discusses the idea of survival, which, in my view, is vividly and visibly reflected in the metanarrative presented by Lispector. Finally, the unusual structure of The Fifth Story undeniably draws attention to the complexity of Lispector’s poetics.

This paper is an attempt at alter-globalist criticism of the contemporary discourse of world literature from the perspective of a researcher of two small European literatures (namely, Polish and Lithuanian). Beginning with classical definitions, the study analyses concrete proposals of the canon of world literature in order to indicate its violent character and prove the existence of the principle of “spoilage” of information inscribed in the criticised discourse.