Local Speech, Global Speech: The Languages of World Literature

Lukaszyk's goal is to explore the multilingualism of literature, its ability to convey key concepts across and beyond cultural borders, and also to reflect on the status of the languages that make up literary systems. The growing rate of language extinction, which entails an ever more impoverished diversity of oral literatures, indicates the urgency of such research, of bridging the gap between global literary studies and the archiving of the heritage of traditional cultures, and of studying the transition from oral literatures that function locally to written literature that circulates globally. The key hypothesis concerns the role of global literature and trans-indigenous studies in the preservation of unique conceptualisations of the world developed within indigenous cultures facing the extinction of their languages.