Literature in Georgia. Between Small Literature and World Literature

In October 2018, Georgia was the guest of honor at the Frankfurter Buchmesse. For the first time after the collapse of the Soviet Union, literature from Georgia was presented in its entirety in a foreign country and foreign language. So far, only little research has been conducted on Georgian literature in the German-speaking space. However, it is the discrepancy between a small language with only about five million speakers and a tradition that reaches back 1500 years that makes Georgian literature a revealing case study, even challenging our mostly Eurocentric models of the development of world literature.

The aim of the project is to produce a book on the literary development in Georgia, with a particular focus on its asynchrony with the Eurocentric models for the periodization of literary history. Unlike previous histories of Georgian literature, which attempt to portray the entirety of Georgian literature in the style of compendia, this project chooses not to work chronologically and instead takes on a problem-oriented and thematic approach to literary analysis and organization. Thus, the project takes on a double perspective: First, Georgian literature is viewed outside the frame of national literary historiography and instead situated between the opposing and yet complementary concepts of “minor/small literature” and “world literature.” Second, theoretical issues that touch on the concepts of “national literature,” “world literature,” and “minor/small literature” are discussed from the perspective of Georgia.  The project does not compare Georgian literature to other literatures. Instead, it situates individual works or groups of works within a multilingual and intertextual context. Thus, the focus lies not on the genesis of individual works but on their intertextual resonance.

Fig. above:
Sulchan-Saba Orbeliani: Georgian Dictionary, Source: Wikimedia [left]
Newspaper H2SO4 (1924), Design: Irakli Gamrekeli (p. 23–24), Source: modernism.ge (with courtesy of the website) [right]