ABSTRACT
Rather than keeping the study of national literatures and comparative literature apart, the Slovak comparatist Dionyz Durisin advocates joining them in a single discipline, for which he coined the name “theory of interliterary process.” Starting in the late 1960s, Durisin’s aim was to formulate a general theory of world literature, which in the first instance involved a systematic critique of the so-called “French school” of comparative literature. For Durisin, the interliterary process consists of the integration of literary relationships whose final stage is represented by world literature. World literature is defined as the structured system of literary phenomena that are either genetically or typologically related. One of the most controversial aspects of Durisin’s theory is his understanding of national literatures as the minimal units of the interliterary process.
