There is hardly any doubt that most turning points in the history of small and minor literatures have been provoked from the outside, in the first place under direct influence of some new current engendered and spread from “centers”, traditionally identified with major nations and linguistic communities. As compared with small nations, creative cultures of “centers” have historically enjoyed much more freedom, because (more than often) under the coverage of political-economic and military might they have been able to develop without looming existential threats from the outside. At the same time, no culture is inherently homogeneous. Especially since the Modern Age conformist and rebellious creativity have been in a constant state of confrontation as well as mutual interactivity. Therefore, the history of cultural creativity is full of paradoxes and surprises, both in “centers” and “peripheries”. Creative culture has nearly always retained at least a relative independence, in regard to the official society with its material power and business structures. I would like to show that beyond a huge number of intertextualities extending from “centers” to “peripheries” (the physical and mental locus of small and minor cultures), easily traceable in formal and external signs of literary works, there exists in parallel a phenomenon which could be tentatively defined as “transgeniality”. I will try to reveal some of such transgenialities comparing the poetics and philosophy of (mainly) three poets, the Spaniard Antonio Gamoneda (born in 1931), the Yi-Chinese poet Jidi Majia (born in 1961) and the Estonian poet Juhan Liiv (1864–1913).

Nations whose cultural tradition due to historical reasons is not large, especially smaller nations, cannot display centuries-old academic traditions which philosophy as a field of knowledge and research would presuppose. Luckily philosophy is not merely a faculty of knowledge but represents the field of perception to which poets have contributed since the oldest times – in parallel with philosophical practice in ancient Greece and long before philosophy became established as a university discipline in Western Europe. It would be too much to expect from poets a rational systematization in developing their thoughts. However, it does not mean at all that their thought would have been incapable of penetrating into life’s darker zones, with which enlightened knowledge has often instinctively kept its distance.

Relying on some of the ideas of Yuri M. Lotman on “semiosphere”, the dynamics and dialogue between “centres” and “peripheries”, as well as on my own ideas on cultural symbiosis expounded in my essay books A Call for Cultural Symbiosis. Meditations from U (Toronto, 2005) and Kümme kirja Montaigne’ile. “Ise ja “teine” (Ten Letters to Montaigne. ‘Self ” and ‘Other’, in Estonian: Tartu, 2014; in English, 2018) and inspired by the recent foundation in China of the International Association for Ethical Literary Criticism, I will try to meditate on the interrelation of Comparative Literature, World Literature and Ethical Literary Criticism both in theory and in the practice of teaching and researching literature at universities and high schools. The main purpose is to look at the ways how a “self”-centred practice of literary research and teaching (formalistic as well as sociological approaches, restricting World Literature to the Western mainstream, or just dealing with one’s own national literature, avoiding its comparative contextualization) could be gradually replaced by a symbioticdialogical treatment of literature, capable of providing our activity with a firm and solid ethical dimension, something that would definitely strengthen the position of humanities in the world academia.

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