THE NOTION OF WORLD LITERATURE AND THE DEFINITION OF LITERATURE IN WESTERN AND INDIAN LITERARY STUDIES

World literature is one of the key concepts of comparative literature. The famous German writer J.W. Goethe used the term to describe the growing availability of texts from other nations. The additive and the selective notion of world literature have later gained common acceptance among literary scholars. The Slovak theorist Dionyz Durisin developed his own historiographical notion of world literature which finally led him to abandon the traditional comparatistics altogether. The present paper is an attempt at situating the notion of literature underlying Durisin's notion of world literature in the discourse about literature in the West and in India. Comparative poetics, which is the best known among Western comparativists through the work of Earl Miner, pointed out the existence of literary critical traditions outside the Western world. The Sanskrit tradition, which also developed a poetics belonging to this category, includes a rich theoretical discourse on the nature of literature. Durisin based his theory of inter-literariness on Veselovsky's historical poetics combined with structuralism. His theory, which claims to offer a theoretical background for writing a history of world literature, tries to understand literature through history. Sanskrit poetics, however, sees the value of a literary text predominantly in its ability to offer an opportunity for the enjoyment of 'rasa'. The experience of 'rasa' is a gustation of permanent human emotional states and is not bound to interpretational changes due to the different historical situation. The structuralist approach, not to mention its limitations as perceived by Western literary scholars, proves to be totally inadequate in case of non-Western literatures. It follows then, that although the theory of inter-literariness tries to overcome the Euro-centrism of the earlier literary studies by its openness to literatures of the non-Western world, its theoretical basis remains euro-centric. The existence of affective-expressive poetics represents a challenge to the theory of inter-literariness.