Unisolated locality, or A cultural universal in action

Abstract

The author assumes that the former idea of the cultural universal implied the danger of unification for a national and cultural identity associated with something conventional, virtual, essentially spurious, and thus divorced from the national-literary discourse. The exaggerated identification of tradition and the universal blocked a further extension of the semantic space of literature. The article considers the mutually complementary nature of tradition, on the one hand, and novelty, singularity, and a consolidating supra-ethnic idea, on the other: to preserve itself, individuality needs communicativeness, whereas ‘the force of universality,’ according to Hegel, ‘contains particularity.’ The unique and individual qualities of each national literature suggest unisolated locality and, therefore, the universality of the particular. In the specific literary work (A. Kim’s prose) the article traces the author’s predisposition for a holistic worldview that combines a national mode and a universalization paradigm.