Abstract: The essay seeks to assess the contemporary epistemological and political benefits of revisiting the Acta Comparationis Litterarum Universarum archive, in particular Hugo Meltzl’s more theoretical contributions to it. Simply speaking, the central objective here is to think “with” Meltzl’s world about the twenty-first-century world. Mapping the former onto the latter, Christian Moraru proposes, may potentially invigorate our efforts as comparatists and even citizens at present. Following some deliberately presentist methodological clarifications and loosely in dialogue with recent interventions in world theory, actor-network analysis, and agential-speculative realism, Moraru wonders about the extent to which what he calls the “Meltz world” may afford less hierarchical world- and earth systems, ontologies, and attendant critical insights, probing angles, and Auerbachian Ansatzpunkte. Further, if such affordances obtain in Meltzl and elsewhere in the Acta Comparationis, then how might one deploy them methodologically today? How about Meltzl’s Transylvania as “method,” as “Transylvanianism”? And how about the world-reading and worldbuilding possibilities they open up or foreclose? The paper concludes with a decalogue—a rejoinder of sorts to Meltz’s “decaglotism”—answering these and related questions.

Keywords: Hugo Meltzl, Sámuel Brassai, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Erich Auerbach, Ansatzpunkt, Acta Comparationis Litterarum Universarum, comparatism, World Literature, world theory, world-reading/worldbuilding, presentism, Transylvania as method, “Transylvanianism,” nationalism, imperialism, epistemology, ontology

Acknowledgement: This work was funded by the EU’s NextGenerationEU instrument through the National Recovery and Resilience Plan of Romania—Pillar III-C9-18, through the project A Global History of Romanian Comparatism: A Case Study in Inter-Imperial Comparative Literature (1877-1944), PNRR-III-C9-2023-I8-CF 22/27.07.2023, contract no. 760276/26.03.2024.