How does Cold War bipolarity (past and present) alter the “world” that World Literature names? The Russian Federation’s invasions of Ukraine have reintroduced competing imaginations of global dominion by upending post-Soviet unipolarity. The unipolar model has nevertheless structured the field of Comparative Literature since 1991 by helping to articulate the grounds of comparison. In the twenty-first century, renewed nuclear threat intersects with ongoing climate catastrophe. This lecture develops a new World Literary paradigm that considers the dual role of market forces and planetary crisis in shaping World Literary space and the comparative endeavor. Anthropogenic climate catastrophe and resurgent bipolarity now necessitate thinking in terms of an “end of the world” literature. Aesthetic objects produced during the Cold War—especially within the circuits of literary and artistic exchange between the Soviet Union, German Democratic Republic, and Afro-Asian Solidarity Movement—offer an essential resource for reckoning with the dilemmas of solidarity and universality attendant upon contemporary collective life in extremis.
Cate I. Reilly is an associate professor of literature in the Program in Literature at Duke University. A scholar of comparative literature, her research focuses on global modernism, continental philosophy, the medical humanities, World Literature and postcolonial studies from a perspective in dialogue with the literatures and languages of Central and Eastern Europe. She is the author of Psychic Empire: Literary Modernism and the Clinical State (Columbia University Press, 2024). Her articles have appeared or are forthcoming in Comparative Literature, Ecokritike, College Literature, The Slavic and East European Journal, and Literature and Medicine, among others. She has contributed chapters to edited volumes on topics ranging from the history of embodied cognition to the politics of psychoanalysis in global translation. She is currently at work on a second book that examines World Literature from the Cold War to the present.