Epilegomena: Literary Studies and the Canon

Abstract

This book has dealt with four post—World War II authors using migration as its vantage point. I have argued that the twentieth century witnessed an increase in the number of migrant authors, especially after World War II. The rise of Nazi Germany in the 1930s resulted in waves of migrants, on the one hand those German Jews trying to escape racial persecution; on the other hand those Germans migrating outward as the borders of the Reich expanded. In 1945, the collapse of the Third Reich Inverted the formerly outbound migration to an inbound movement as many thousands of Germans living in the newly conquered territories of the Third Reich, among them the young Günter Grass, were driven back across the old borders. The rise of Communism in Eastern Europe, in Czechoslovakia partly a postwar answer to the fascist oppression of the Nazis, was another cause of mass migrations and political exilations. One of its victims was Milan Kundera, initially a member of the Communist Party, who left his Czech homeland in 1975 after being publicly banned from libraries and bookshops, as well as from any future professional positions. Finally, not only does Salman Rushdie exemplify how decolonization accentuated the post-World War II epoch as an age of (voluntary) migration, but his writing also testifies to the drastic changes in the relationship between the former colonizer and the former colonized as the old dualisms of center/periphery and home/abroad were abandoned or renegotiated.

This may well be, for compararive literary history, the next step in choosing its future tasks and justifications: to acknowledge the relativity of all systems within the perpetual motion of the world system, but also to highlight creatively particular past and/or present commonalities that at a given moment, within rhe present discourse of one or several cultures, light up and make sense together.

—Eva Kushner, The Living Prism