Joseph Reményi and socialist world literature: shifting minor, small and world literature from singular to plural

Abstract

Hungarian American scholar, Joseph Reményi’s concepts of “minority literature,” “small nation literature,” and “world literatures” highlight the shift from the singular forms Deleuze and Guattari’s “minor literature,” Pascale Casanova’s “small literature,” and Marx and Engels and Karl Radek’s “world literature” to their plural counterparts. In the discourse on “minor literature” and “small literature,” Reményi offers a nuanced categorization of Hungarian literary production following the First World War. He delineates it into three distinct strands: “literature in Hungary,” “literature of Hungarian exiles,” and “Hungarian literature in the Successor States.” This tripartite classification not only encapsulates the varied loci of Hungarian literary expression but also underscores the emerging literary dichotomy between Hungarian and Slavic & Soviet literatures in the aftermath of the Second World War. As for “world literature”, Reményi’s conceptual framework, which pivots on the axes of “regionalism” and “internationalism,” segments world literature into four stratified layers: minority and marginal → local → national → world. This theoretical model facilitates a repositioning of the intrinsic diversities inherent within each stratum, mapping them onto a spectrum of diverse nations, cultural groups, and minority populations. Furthermore, Reményi’s concept of “world literatures” represents a shift from the singular notion of Geothe’s “eine allemeine Weltliteratur”, Marx and Engels’ “eine Weltliteratur”, and Radek’s “contemporary world literature” to a pluralized understanding. For “socialist literature”, Reményi’s categorization of Hungarian literature within the Western European tradition, as opposed to Eastern European literature, signifies the multifaceted nature of socialist literature. This concept, initially introduced by Marx and Engels in 1848, further elaborated by Radek in 1934, is eventually expanded by Reményi into a more pluralistic form as socialist literatures in 1956. The fusion of Reményi’s concept of “world literatures” and “socialist literatures” provided a gateway to construct Socialist World Literature.