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In this paper, I intend to examine the manner in which the recent reshaping of the notion of “world literature” reacts on the reading of Second-World national literatures. My first step is to attempt a definition of the concepts I intend to work with. I will begin with the term Second-World national literature, since, despite certain debatable aspects, this notion seems to be less controversial. Thus, Second-World national literature will denote any written literature in a Second-World country, in the meaning ascribed to this phrase in the classification made by the French sociologist Alfred Sauvy, more particularly with reference to the (former) communist – mainly Soviet – bloc countries (Sauvy 1952: 14). In other words, I am dealing with what is termed occasionally, in the current economic discourse, as “developing” countries, opposing both “developed” western democracies and “underdeveloped” former colonial countries. In fact, a similar approach was established, in the field of literary theory, 25 years ago, when Fredric Jameson published his famous article ThirdWorld Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism (Jameson 1986). Certainly, the positioning of certain state organizations in this or that category is a sophisticated matter in the case of countries such as China – a country whose political communist tradition is very powerful, a country that, during the last decades, has become an economic superpower, but which Jameson still ranked among Third-World countries (essentially, a large part of his argumentation is based on the case of the great Chinese writer Lu Xun). However, I believe we can include without difficulty in the category of SecondWorld literatures the national literatures of the Centraland Eastern-European countries, such as the Romanian, Hungarian or Estonian ones, countries that were half a century under the political and cultural domination of the Soviet Union and which are still, noticeably, in their “post-communist” stage.

Reading World Literature: Elliptical or Hyperbolic? The Case of Second-World National Literatures