Igor Grbić, Faculty of Humanities, Juraj Dobrila University of Pula, Croatia

The Occidentocentric Fallacy: Turning Literature into a Province

Occidentocentrism in literary criticism has created an extremely lopsided and partial idea of literary history and theory, and, worst of all, of literature itself. Unlike non-Western cultures, familiar with their own and Western heritage, the West presents a particularly sad case of being autistically concentrated on itself. The book diagnoses the present situation, warns of the need to acknowledge it as a circumstance not simply piteous, but first of all disastrous for our understanding of the literary phenomen as such, and finally suggests some practical remedies. It thus includes perspectives from both non-Western cultures and minority cultures within a supposed West, contrary to the still much too common habit of identifying the world (as in the syntagm world literature) with the West (which is again downsized to a part of Europe, and the USA). Also considered, as part of the problem, are various cultural assymetries pertaining to literature (too many of them stemming from big-versus-small literatures/cultures), global awards such as the Nobel Prize, and translation issues. The prime concern of the book is awakening its readers to the fact that, incredibly but truly enough, literature (much like other spheres of humanities studies, but so unlike those of natural sciences) in its total, all-human purport and realization, is something yet to be discovered, and literary scholarship something yet to be established.