The goal of “East European literature as World Literature on Interconnectedness” is to explore the broadening of the concept of world literature in a bid to include literatures of Europe’s East. World literature has been commonly understood as literatures from the culturally and linguistically dominant countries, while carrying the covert implication that they also carry universal significance. Recent emphasis on textual circulation has broadened the definition and opened the floodgate to literatures produced on a planetary level. Yet East European literatures continue to occupy a marginal position, suggesting that participation in circulation does not de-stigmatise culturally ostensibly more negligible literary productions.

A rather overdue appreciation of Eastern European literatures on the world stage has recently been initiated by a genealogical interest in the rise of the discipline, rediscovering the 19^th-century Transylvanian periodical Acta comparationis as an initiator of comparative literature. (Szabó, 2020) Institutionalised critical treatments such as Bloomsbury’s Literatures as World Literature series, whose current 34 volumes, encompassing geographies, textual genres, authors and transmediality, have now devoted three volumes to East European literatures (Romanian, Bulgarian, Hungarian). The legitimate participation of East European literatures within the circulation of world literature has also gained strength from highly prestigious international prizes. In 2025, László Krasznahorkai was awarded the Nobel Prize, while shortly later, the Canadian-Hungarian David Szalay’s Hungarian-themed Flesh won the Booker Prize, thus proving that what earlier was condescendingly treated as a marginal thematic can now gain status within the mechanisms of reputation-making.

This panel seeks to revisit the cognitive models shaping the inclusion of East European literatures in these volumes. These models rest on the understanding that East European literatures show parallel aesthetic developments to Western writing (e.g. Baroque epic poetry); that East European writing is open to absorbing influence (e.g. novels modelled on UIysses), or certain authors achieve the status of the world author (e.g. Czesław Miłosz). The panel seeks to confirm and modulate this understanding by offering three case studies that focus on parallel development; global standing; but also on the transnational in terms of identity formation (Szalay) and of generic circulation (the development of new genre).

Bita Takrimi examines the work of Czech poet Jiří Kolář in relation to American experimental poetry, focusing on shared practices of fragmentation, collage, and textual recombination. She argues that Kolář’s poetics, particularly in Prométheova játra, participates in a broader transnational dialogue with mid-20th-century American poets such as T. S. Eliot and the postwar avant-garde. Rather than viewing these connections through a model of influence, the paper frames them as instances of parallel innovation shaped by comparable historical pressures, including war, censorship, and modernist crisis, revealing a network of aesthetic interconnectedness that challenges national literary boundaries. This approach positions East European literature as an active contributor to global modernism and rethinks world literature as a space of multidirectional exchange.

Global standing is the centre of Szidonia Haragos’s examination of David Szalay’s Flesh, whose multi-hyphenated identity (born to Canadian and Hungarian parents, having resided in London and now in Vienna) foregrounded the experience of transnational authorship. His focus is on the post-industrial migrant Hungarian figure, whose life is shaped by neoliberal economic drives and geographical dislocation. Haragos looks at Szalay’s complex negotiations of transnational and translinguistic interconnectedness, along with his thematic preoccupations with transcultural and diasporic identities.

In a groundbreaking strand of research, Iona Luca’s paper focuses on the nascent genre of ‘police-file based autobiographical writing,’ emerging in the former East Germany and written in response to information contained in newly opened police archives. These file-based autobiographies have largely remained a regional phenomenon, with various forms of “minor transnationalism” characterising their circulation and connection. Rather than treating these texts (Herta Müller, Katherine Verdery) as regionally confined testimonies, they are treated as narrative reconstructions that emerge at the intersection of state apparatus, intimacy, and world literary formation.

In probing these three examples of East European literatures as World Literatures, these papers confirm the generally accepted basis for their inclusion. Takrimi’s paper shows aesthetic parallels showing the participation of Czech literature in planetary literary movements (thus expanding the geographies of modernism), while Haragos’s paper focuses on world authorship. But Haragos’s paper, shifting the focus from the locality of origin to the locality of the transnational opens up the potential that the region is capable of producing a genre whose planetary transformative potential will have future deployment. This is the true contribution of the panel to those broader political and ideological debates that frame the trajectory of World Literature by mapping its constitutive conditions.