Ďurišin's interliterary mediterranean as a model for world literature

Abstract

During the 1980s, the Slovak literary theorist Dionýz Ďurišin drew on the structuralist and Marxist frameworks prevalent in the socialist Bloc to develop his concept of interliterary communities. In 1992, he published Čo je svetová litera- túra? (What is World Literature?), which provided the foundation for applying this theory to such contexts of world literature as Central Europe and the Mediterranean. His final project was the trilingual (Italian, French, and Slovak) Il Mediterraneo. Una rete interletteraria (The Mediterranean: An Interliterary Network 2000), coedited with Armando Gnisci, which brought together Slovak, Czech, Russian, and Italian scholars working on Greek, Turkish, Maghrebi, and other Mediterranean literatures. This chapter uses Ďurišin's interliterary theory of the Mediterranean to examine the pioneering Arabic prose text Al-Sāq 'alā al-sāq (Leg over Leg, 1855) by the Ottoman-Lebanese writer Ahmad Fāris al-Shidyāq, which takes its autobiographical narrator around the Mediterranean and beyond, challenging its linguistic and political hierarchies. It suggests that the interliterary Mediterranean is the ideal milieu for comparatists to study world literature.